Eighth Grade, Photography, Digital Photography & Video Science Projects (13 results)
Photography utilizes many different technologies to produce the pictures and videos we've come to take for granted: optics, electronics, mathematics, computer science, materials science, and mechanical engineering, to name a few.
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Try the annual Engineering Challenge from Science Buddies! Open to all students worldwide, a new challenge and prizes are announced every January. Explore the current challenge as well as ones from past years!
Imagine you are on a trip and see something interesting that you want to share with your friends. What do you do? You take a picture with your cell phone and e-mail it to them, of course. But did you realize that the same technology can be used to save lives? Using their cell phones modified as inexpensive microscopes, medical personnel can look at blood smears to help diagnose diseases like malaria and cholera. In this photography science project you will build a simple and inexpensive cell…
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In this engineering challenge, you will build a car powered by nothing but a rubber band. The farther the car goes, and the fewer materials you use to build it, the higher your score. Enter your score in the 2024 Science Buddies Engineering Challenge for a chance to win prizes! Teachers, lesson plan versions of this challenge are also available.
Wondering what sustainable, high-producing agriculture might look like? This science project explores how analyzing bird's-eye-view pictures of a field can make farmers aware of variations in their fields. Farmers can use this information to optimize their farming practices, or even feed this information to high-tech agricultural equipment so the machines can automatically adjust their actions (like fertilizing or watering) to the needs of a piece of land.
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Does your home have any pet doors or gates for dogs, cats, or other animals? Some automatic pet doors can be set up to allow only certain animals through. These doors can help you control which pets are able to go outside alone or which ones have access to specific food, litter boxes, or toys. But why buy such a door when you can make one? In this project you will build your own automatic pet door that works with a magnetic collar tag. Exactly how you use it is up to you!
Have you ever seen a video where it looked like a car's wheels were spinning backward even though the car was driving forward? What about helicopter blades that looked like they were spinning very slowly, or even not moving at all? This illusion is called the "wagon wheel effect," named after old movies where it looked like wagon wheels were spinning backward. In this science project you will learn how the wagon wheel effect works and how you can film it yourself.
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…
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 phone or camera, tripod, and a special filter to take pictures using near infrared illumination. It's a whole new way of looking at the world.
Do you ever use the manual camera settings when taking pictures with your phone? Does your phone have more than one camera lens? This project is a great way to learn more about your phone's camera(s) and how to take better pictures. You can also do this project with a traditional point-and-shoot camera or another camera like a DSLR.
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…
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 speed. One student has used a video camera to measure the speed of an arrow shot from a bow. The following project can help you set up your experiment: Distance and Speed of Rolling Objects Measured from Video Recordings.
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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.
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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.)
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