A camera is a camera!

 

In the winter term of our STEAM course, we've been studying light for the first unit. We had various discussions as to what allowed us to see light, how our eyes worked, as well as what light is. We discovered that light was both a particle and a wave and also found that there are many parts of our eyes that contribute to our perception of light. The one question that was so interesting that we used it as a topic for this project, was, "Can an object other than eyes be used to capture light in a still state?" The most obvious answer to that question is, yes. There is an object besides our eyes that can capture light and we use it almost every day. A camera. Cameras use a shutter method to capture an object in motion by allowing a sliver of light through a small passage in the camera that allows you to see that object at the moment that the light hits it. This answer brought us to another question. If a camera captures light In this way and uses light reflection/refraction, then could we make one at home? Here's what we did.

There were 3 options we could choose from to build a camera that captured light. The first was a cardboard camera obscura, the second was a pinhole camera, and the third was a room camera obscura. I chose the cardboard camera Obscura which seemed the easiest to me. First I started with an empty paper towel roll and cut it about 1/3 of the way from the bottom. Next, I grabbed some aluminum foil and taped it to one side of the smaller piece that I cut, making sure that it covered the side completely and was letting no light in. After that, I poked a small hole in the center of that to create my light hole. The next thing to do was to grab the other, bigger piece of paper towel roll and tape a piece of parchment paper to one end of it just like we did with the aluminum on the other piece. With all of those steps, My Camera Obscura was complete.

JH, Camera Obscura, 2021

After I finished making my camera, it was time to start playing around with it. Like I explained before, the camera works by allowing a sliver of light in for just a moment so that an object can be seen. Naturally,  based on this reasoning, I held my camera up to a source of light and found something interesting. The result of me holding the camera up to the light made everything inverted. If I moved the camera to the right the light would move to the left and vise versa.  This is due to the light being reflected against the parchment paper. When something is reflected it's usually the complete opposite or, more commonly know as InvertedBelow are some pictures of exactly that. The first image shows when I was looking directly at the light through the camera and the image below it shows when I was looking at a slightly higher angle.

JH, Camera View high, 2021

JH, Camera view direct, 2021

The fact that the object I looked at through the camera appeared inverted is also a hint at the principle that light itself is both a wave and a particle. This is proof that light is a wave because of this analogy. If you point a wave in the direction of a wall, the wave would just keep its form and splat onto the wall. Whereas, if you threw particles at a wall they would bounce back to you. The same is for light; the particle variant of light allows it to be reflected or bounced back in an inverted state while the wave variant of light allows it to appear the same when it's looked at directly. 

The last aspect of this project was the integration of a math concept. If we lay our camera down flat with a certain distance away from the object we were trying to see through the camera, It will form a right triangle. The light source I used was my table lamp so the height of that ended up being 21 inches. The height of my camera while laying flat was 2 inches and the distance from the aluminum foil and the parchment paper was around 7 inches. With all of those measurements the distance between my camera and the "object of observation", came out to be 140 inches, and the volume of my camera ended up being 34.54 inches. To better visualize all of this, see the image below.

JH, Calculations, 2021

This action project was really hard to complete for me simply because the light is a difficult topic to understand. It may have been difficult, but it was fun as well because we got to see light from a more fun perspective rather than a technical perspective, which would have been a little more boring. I would definitely recommend that people try this method of making cameras at home for a fun and informative activity.