Photo Journal

Eye Splash

Salem Elrahal and Chip Rotolo

The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

March 31, 2008 - April 8, 2008

Photo Journal

04/02/08

Today we got all of our equipment. We were so excited; we could not wait to take some awesome pictures. Setting up was slightly harder than we had thought, but it was not much of a problem. We filled the water dripper and set up the eye under it. Then we mounted the camera. After we had all of the proper wires in place, we had to adjust the delay trigger to get the flash when we wanted it. This took a little of trial and error with adjusting the coarse and fine tune controls as the lights were off. Finally, it was time to take some pictures. Chip was in charge of operating the camera, while Salem held the flash unit in place. We took one picture then turned on the lights to look at it. When we pressed the “play” button on the camera, it said there were no pictures! This was not a good sign, so we took another picture. The same thing happened. At this point we were getting a bit worried. We got Dr.Winters and he suggested formatting the memory card for the camera. We started the formatting process and waited. About fifteen minutes later, Dr.Winters came by to see how we were coming along but the camera was not done formatting the card yet. He said this was a problem, so he gave us a new memory card to try. The same problem arose with the new memory card. At this point, Dr.Winters figured it would be beneficial to just give us a new camera so we returned the Nikon D1, and he gave us a NIkon D50. From here on out, it was a fairly straightforward day. We got some nice pictures with one flash, but we were only lighting the eye from the front. We decided it might be better to light it from the back. We took nine pictures, each from one cell formed by a 3 X 3 imaginary grid behind the splash box. Then we observed that the two cells formed at the upper corners gave us the best pictures. After that, we decided to try two flashes in the two top right corners. A cardboard box was left over by one group and we decided to use it to mount one of the flash units behind the splash box, and Salem was going to hold the other flash unit. The pictures did not turn out to well, so we stuck with using just one flash unit. We took some more pictures and saw that we didn’t have a larger enough depth of field in order to catch the whole drop in focus. We tried moving the camera farther away from the eye and also raising the f-stop. This meant that we had to add the other flash unit back. The first flash unit was almost directly overhead the eye, so the second one went right behind it. In our opinion, after this modification we got our best pictures. Then we looked down and saw that we were taking pictures on the “basic” quality. We moved it to the highest quality and were able to shoot about 5 or 6 pictures before it was time to leave. We think we had a relatively good day and look forward to taking more pictures with the highest quality setting, as they turned out really nicely.

4/3/08

Today we had very little setup to do, as we were able to leave all of our equipment out from the day before. We wanted to just do minor adjustments today in order to get the best quality picture. Instead of having two flash units above and behind the eye, we brought them down to eye level, one forty-five degrees on each side of the cameras path. We also moved the camera a slight bit back to get a better focus. After doing some test shots, we realized that and we were able to get an even higher resolution picture using the raw picture setting. The only problem was that we would have to have an incredible focus for the picture to turn out well. We spent most of the entire day trying to get the best focus. From where we were at, drops were bouncing up and hitting the camera, so we had to constantly clean the lens until we started covering it between drops. Adjusting the delay was the other big thing we wanted to get just right. By the end of the day, we were able to create an excellent nine shot slideshow of the drop’s progression downward and hitting of the eye. The little time we were left with allowed us to organize our photos and work on our data table. With good teamwork and much patience, we made the most of this day.

4/4/08

Today we fixed the few things that had been moved in our setup, and tried some more pictures. Yesterday we found the best setup, aperture, and flash locations, so we didn’t have much we needed to do except go for good shots. After getting some pictures in the morning, we uploaded them and started browsing our entire collection. We also took some pictures of our setup, and even one of Chip EATING THE EYE! We picked out some of our favorite shots, and even made a slide show of eight progressing photos. The slideshow was our favorite creation of the day. Another group borrowed our flash units, and we had all of our shots, so we started experimenting with our web page. After installing Microsoft FrontPage, we did some website building practices and figured out what each of us would do. We both understand what we need to do and are exciting about working on the page in the next few days. We are exactly where we need to be in this entire process, maybe a little bit ahead, so we have no doubt that we can finish with an impressive project.