Top 200 Photos: #97

Science! In today’s Top 200 Photo

photo #97 is:

I mentioned before that one of the things I love about photography is the ability to allow you to see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In that photo I mentioned using photoshop to allow the photo to display changes in time as well as showing the other 3 dimensions. In this photo, I did not use photoshop. Instead I used stroboscopic photography. I was so excited when I found out my 580 EX was capable of these types of shots. I’d always seen them in my physics textbooks and I wanted to emulate them. This is from one of my first experiments with this type of photography.

This photo is called 9.81 meters per second * second. It’s the acceleration due to gravity on Earth. Acceleration means that the velocity is not constant. And, as you can see, the scissors are further apart on each pulse of flash. This would continue to happen until the scissors reached terminal velocity. In the world of Physics 112, there is no such thing and the scissors would infinitely accelerate until they hit the ground. Then it would impart a lot of that energy to the ground and whatever energy was left over would cause it to bounce. In real life, at some point, drag from the air slows the object so that it stops accelerating and just falls with a constant velocity.

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