ABOUT

Photographer: Jonathan Knowles
Creative Director: Barret Helander
Creative Director: Rhys Hughes
Head of Production: Megan O’Hagan
Production Assistant: Beatrice Icke
Studio Producer: Emma Harrower
Assistants: Elise Kleis and Madison Blackwood

The Breathable Bullet
This is a campaign highlighting the dangers of the amount of lead contained within disposable vapes. Vapers literally breath in poison. The agency had a bullet shape made from the amount of lead contained within each and every one of these vapes, to show the amount of poison that will build up in a vaper's body.

The Bullet
To capture the danger hidden in plain sight, we created a bullet sculpted from precisely 56.8 micrograms of lead — the same amount found in a single illegal vape. Measuring just 0.3mm in height, the bullet was almost imperceptible to the naked eye. It did actually have the text etched into it.
Photographing something so microscopically small presented a series of technical and artistic challenges. First, we needed to find it, quite literally, in the frame. Using advanced microscopic lenses, we hunted for this almost invisible object within the viewfinder, stabilising it in a world where even a breath could shift the scene.
Once located, we lit the bullet as we would any still-life subject: with care and respect for its materiality. But this wasn’t a single shot. Instead, we embarked on an intricate process of focus stacking, capturing over 100 high-resolution images, each one focused on a minutely different plane. These slices were then seamlessly layered in post-production to create a final image with depth, clarity, and weight.
The result is a visual that speaks loudly, despite its almost imperceptible subject. A stark reminder that something so small can carry deadly consequences; not just metaphorically, but literally.

Other images

All of the other images were shot using our 100MP Hasselblad, with clean lighting to define the objects themselves in the pure clinical sense to deliver the shocking message.