Photoshoot. Pose.
Hello everyone, and welcome to my first Action Project for my Winter Term class, Light, Sound and Time! It’s about how we interact with light, sound and time and how important they are. This unit, we
focused on how we interact with light and how we can use and manipulate it. Through this unit, I learned about different parts of the eye, how those parts work to help us perceive light and images. For this AP, we were tasked with making a pinhole camera, one the most primitive versions of a camera. We needed its measurements to calculate how far the object we wanted to photograph should be from it. We then went to a dark room to photograph and develop these items. I hope you enjoy this project!
The camera being painted black inside is important, as the light will be absorbed by it, being able to have light-sensitive paper in it to make an image. The reason is that, when light enters through the pinhole, instead of reflecting all over the place, it’ll get absorbed. If it wasn’t all black, it would ruin the image we would want to make. Because of this fact, it doesn’t show off the principles of reflecting or refracting. This is because, as we were trying to make sure they didn’t reflect any light within them, it would go against the entire purpose of this experiment. One science principle it does show off is that light is energy. This is because, in the absence of light, the paper stayed black. The moment even a little light came through, however, it almost immediately made the paper white due to the chemicals inside the paper. Because the paper was able to record the image of what was in front of it when exposed to light, I believe this proves that light equals energy.
For the math-related numbers: the width of my pinhole camera was 3.125 inches. The height of the pinhole was 2.625. The height of my object is 10.5 inches. Using cross-multiplication, I was able to get 12.5, which is the proportional width. I then subtracted 12.5 and 3.125 to get 9.375 inches, which is the minimum distance I needed to have my object away from my camera to have my camera capture it.
Using this information, we can also make similar triangles, which are just triangles that are proportional. First we start off with the measurements of the pinhole camera, 2.625 and 3.125. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, we can do 2.625^2 + 3.125^2. When we square these numbers and add them, we get 16.65625, the square root of which is 4.08. For the big triangle, we do a similar stunt, using the same theorem to get 10.5^2 + 12.5^2. Squaring and adding them together, we get 266.5, of which the square root of which is 16.324. To get the angles, we do a little bit of inverse tangent (which is still the same as regular tangent, just with a ^-1), which allows us to do tan^-1(2.625/ 3.125) to get 40.03, which is our Theta angle. We then add that with 90 (since this is a right triangle), and subtract that from 180 to get 49.97 degrees.
focused on how we interact with light and how we can use and manipulate it. Through this unit, I learned about different parts of the eye, how those parts work to help us perceive light and images. For this AP, we were tasked with making a pinhole camera, one the most primitive versions of a camera. We needed its measurements to calculate how far the object we wanted to photograph should be from it. We then went to a dark room to photograph and develop these items. I hope you enjoy this project!
The way this camera was built was fairly simple. First, we took some sort of container (mine was metallic) and painted it black inside. While it was drying, we took some soda cans and made a pinhole for the camera, so light can come through a concentrated point. We sanded it down so make sure it was flat and didn't have any edges. After the paint dried, we then made a hole in the container and overlapped the pinhole with that. Taping the pinhole down, we then made a shutter out of cardboard, so light wouldn't come in when we didn't want it to.
My Pinhole Camera, AR, 2023
1 of 2, AR, 2023
The camera being painted black inside is important, as the light will be absorbed by it, being able to have light-sensitive paper in it to make an image. The reason is that, when light enters through the pinhole, instead of reflecting all over the place, it’ll get absorbed. If it wasn’t all black, it would ruin the image we would want to make. Because of this fact, it doesn’t show off the principles of reflecting or refracting. This is because, as we were trying to make sure they didn’t reflect any light within them, it would go against the entire purpose of this experiment. One science principle it does show off is that light is energy. This is because, in the absence of light, the paper stayed black. The moment even a little light came through, however, it almost immediately made the paper white due to the chemicals inside the paper. Because the paper was able to record the image of what was in front of it when exposed to light, I believe this proves that light equals energy.
"Camera Setup", AR, 2023
At first, we all opened our shutters for 5 minutes as a sort of constant. We then had different times for the second test, and for mine I did 10 minutes. I think the pictures turned out the way the did mainly because there just wasn't enough light to properly take in everything. I also moved the camera a bit during the shooting process, so it contributed to the double images.
For the math-related numbers: the width of my pinhole camera was 3.125 inches. The height of the pinhole was 2.625. The height of my object is 10.5 inches. Using cross-multiplication, I was able to get 12.5, which is the proportional width. I then subtracted 12.5 and 3.125 to get 9.375 inches, which is the minimum distance I needed to have my object away from my camera to have my camera capture it.
Using this information, we can also make similar triangles, which are just triangles that are proportional. First we start off with the measurements of the pinhole camera, 2.625 and 3.125. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, we can do 2.625^2 + 3.125^2. When we square these numbers and add them, we get 16.65625, the square root of which is 4.08. For the big triangle, we do a similar stunt, using the same theorem to get 10.5^2 + 12.5^2. Squaring and adding them together, we get 266.5, of which the square root of which is 16.324. To get the angles, we do a little bit of inverse tangent (which is still the same as regular tangent, just with a ^-1), which allows us to do tan^-1(2.625/ 3.125) to get 40.03, which is our Theta angle. We then add that with 90 (since this is a right triangle), and subtract that from 180 to get 49.97 degrees.
My Triangle, AR, 2023
I’m proud that the camera actually worked. It was a cool experience that was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. If I could do it over again, I would make my pinhole bigger so more light can get in, and make sure I had enough light in general.
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