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Lively, vivid colors can add pizzazz and turn a dull photo into a work of art. Learn how changing the saturation levels of the colors in your photo can really make it pop!
What do you do if you take a photo and it turns out too dark or too bright? You can use your computer to fix it for you.
Do you have a favorite picture? When you have a photo that you treasure, you want it to look as good as possible. Find out how the resolution of a digital photo effects the way it looks when you print it out. How does the quality of the image relate to the resolution?
If the prefix "macro" means large and "micro" means small, then why will the macro setting of a digital camera help take a better picture of a small object? Do this experiment and get the big picture.
What is it that famous photographers do to make their images so pleasing to the eye? Find out if simple rules of geometry and symmetry can make you a better photographer.
Pinhole cameras are not just for grannies! Even compared to all of the latest technology, a pinhole camera still gets beautiful results. Find out how this very simple aperture design works to control the way light enters the lens of your camera.
Did you know that the same digital photo you see on a computer monitor may not look as good in print? When it comes to color profiles, there are a lot of options: RGB, CMYK, grayscale and indexed color! How do you choose the right color profile for the job?
How many bits of information are in a digital photo? It depends on how many possible colors there are. Learn how to choose the right number of colors and bits to post your photo on the web or send it to your best friend.
This is a cool way to learn more about your camera, and how to take better pictures.
Digital cameras can be a great way to learn about photography. Most digital cameras today have LCD screens, so you get instant feedback on your photo. If you make a mistake, no problem, you just delete the picture. It's nice that you don't have to worry about the expense and bother of developing film! This project can help you learn to take better pictures.
A strobe light can illuminate an entire room in just tens of microseconds. Inexpensive strobe lights can flash up to 10 or 20 times per second. This project shows you how to use stroboscopic photography to analyze motion.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have an extra sense? What if you could hear above the normal range (ultrasound) like dogs or bats? What if you could see ultraviolet light, like bees or juvenile trout? What if you could see infrared light, like a rattlesnake or boa constrictor? This project shows you how you can use a camera, tripod and a special filter to take pictures using near infrared illumination. It's a whole new way of looking at the world.
Here's an interesting flash photography project. With an inexpensive Fresnel lens, you can concentrate the light from your flash. You'll be able to shoot with a smaller aperture and a shorter flash duration. This will give you greater depth of focus and will allow you to 'freeze' motion at higher speeds. The trade-off is that the light will be concentrated toward the center of the frame. This project shows you how you can investigate that trade-off and find out how you can best use your flash for 'freezing' motion.
If you sit under a leafy tree on a sunny day, you may notice spots of sunlight on the ground from light passing through spaces between the leaves. Try putting a piece of cardboard on the ground and examining the spots of light on the cardboard. Even though the spaces through which the light is passing are irregular in shape, the spots on the cardboard are round. What you are seeing, in fact, are projected images of the sun. Light passing through an aperture forms an image. A pinhole camera uses a tiny aperture, instead of a fancy lens, to project an image. What happens to the quality of the picture as the size of the pinhole is changed? This project shows you how to find out.
Additional Project Ideas
Note: The following project ideas are abbreviated, without notes to start your background research or a procedure for how to do the experiment. You can identify abbreviated project ideas by the asterisk at the end of the title. If you want a project idea with full instructions, please pick one without an asterisk.
You can compare the picture quality for photos taken at different shutter speeds with the camera handheld vs. with the camera on a tripod. (This is best done with a camera that has manual exposure control.)
Compare the strengths and weaknesses of different digital image formats. How does the amount of compression affect a JPEG image? What happens when you save a JPEG image multiple times?
How does the angle between the lens, the subject's eye, and the flash effect the appearance of red eye? How does the subject's eye color effect red eye?
Your digital photo comprises a certain number of dots in the x and y directions. What happens to the print image quality as you "stretch" those dots out to larger and larger pictures? (Note: This experiment studies the dots per inch in the image itself, not the number of dots per inch that is output by your printer.)
A video camera records 30 "frames" or distinct images per second. (That's for an NTSC camera in the U.S. PAL cameras in other areas of the world take 25 frames per second.) You can use this fact to time events and measure velocity. One student has used a video camera to measure the velocity of an arrow shot from a bow.
If you know or calculate the field of view for your camera, you can use it to measure distances and the height of almost anything. It's all a matter of basic trigonometry.
Students who are mathematically inclined can use the student version of a program like MatLab or Mathematica to convert a digital image into numbers, then perform operations such as sharpening or special effects. This is a great way to learn about image processing algorithms.
Advanced students might want to look for an experiment in the areas of color theory or gamma and light curves.
