I was in the Desert shooting with a friend that is just getting into shooting. I was showing him the technique of drawing and shooting from the hip / rib when in a hand to hand combat situation. Near pt blank range.
I thought the resulting gun powder swirl was kinda cool.
Looks pretty cool. Never seen that effect. What was the distance do you suppose from muzzle to target?
Interesting, we had one of those at a training course a couple of weeks ago. No one had seen it either, kind of a cool pattern.
Nice picture.
around 5-10 feet i’ve gotten that effect, not quite as dramatic as that though. neato. 
in one of my classes the Beretta 9mm was doing that, same ammo as my Sig and a Glock, but the only one that was consistently doing the swirl. I liked it
That was at arms length. Pretty close. Yeo, I thought it was cool too.
Never have seen that before. Must be a just right distance kinda thing. Any closer and you would probably tear up the paper with the muzzle blast.
Yeah, we tore up some paper and cardboard in the process. Ive been shooting my steel targets mostly, it was good to run some real close drills on paper. El Presidente etc.
May be a well known thing to do, but if you put an old t-shirt over the target (preferably an IDPA or IPSC cardboard) you can get good mileage out of paper based targets for contact distance shooting.
Plus it really plays tricks on your shot placement when you don’t have an A-Zone or 10 ring to shoot at…a more realistic way to train at times.
YMMV
Not long after seeing this post I happened to be watching a video of Tom Cruise training for Collateral, and his target had these swirls.