This weekend I went up to the Cities to celebrate Mother's Day in the same town as my mother, and Saturday night Dani, Kyle, and Derek came over. While sitting in the living room, basically just being near each other, Kyle picked up a copy of "National Geographic". This particular issue had a long article about "camera obscura".
Apparently, if you board up all the windows in your apartment, then poke a tiny hole in the wall, the gorgeous scenery outside will show up perfectly - albeit upside-down - on the opposite wall. The photographs the guy in the article had taken were amazing! Really stunning! He had even used prisms or something to make some of the images turn up right-side up in some cases. Look at it here. Right? Is that not incredible? Just the view from that room alone is fantastic, but then the fact that it is upside down inside the apartment is just awesome!
The article (which, let's be honest, I didn't read thoroughly because it was really long and I wanted to get to the playing part of the evening) had a little photograph of how the artist had set up a light bulb outside of a box, and the image of the light bulb showed up upside down inside the box. Dani and I were a little skeptical, but, naturally, because these are the kind of people my friends and I are, we wanted to try it, too.
So we got a box from the garage, a bright yellow Ikea desk lamp from the basement, a stick-pin, a piece of white paper, and some electrical tape. The corners of the box were covered to prevent extra light from getting in, the stick-pin was used to make the tiny hole, and the piece of white paper was placed on the opposite wall of the box. We then turned on the desk lamp, put it in from of the pin hole, and turned off all the living room, kitchen, and hall lights.
We also had to prop our box up on the game box for "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader". Please don't ask what we were doing with that board game. It was useful for our experiment, though.
At first, the image wasn't so great, but we were still excited that it kind of sort of worked. When the pin hole was made just ever-so-slightly larger, our image quality greatly improved. We could see the light bulb and the yellow lampshade perfectly (though upside down) inside the box! It was so cool! This camera obscura thing really works!
We tried getting other things to show up, but most of our experiments were failed. The jellybean bowl didn't work, nor did the lava lamp or an illuminated page from the newspaper. Holding up a glass of water in front of the desk lamp provided some results, however, and it was kind of cool to see the water moving inside the box.
Now I have absolutely no idea why or how this happens. I would like to read the article, but let's be honest, it is really long and the science part of my brain is kind of inept. If I read it right now, I wouldn't understand a lick of it. I need to wait until I get all inspired and motivated, then read it and do some serious internet research.
Until then, I might try to play with this whole camera obscura thing some more and assume that it operates under the same magic science principles that apply to the show "CSI: Miami".
*Now you should go up to the top, right hand part of the blog and take the "30 Rock" survey!*
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