Procedures

    I found a spot to conduct my experiment. I found a black backdrop and strung it on the wall hooks of the lab. I took several pictures of a colliding basketball and tennis ball with the Optura. The camera was 5.1 meters away from the subject. All the pictures were taken with an exposure of -8 and a shutter speed of 1/30 second. I had 3-4 collisions that seemed like the tennis ball shot straight up instead of at an angle. The tennis ball was 6.5cm in diameter and the basketball was 23.5 cm in diameter. (see setup diagram 1.1 & 1.2) I took several pictures of a colliding basketball and tennis ball with the Optura. I uploaded the video and found that I made an unfortunate mistake. I knew that the shutter speed of 1/30 second would not be quick enough to capture a high-speed collision like this but yet I overlooked that fact.

    So I took a guess and increased the shutter speed to 1/500 second and also added one alternate lighting source. The clips came out pretty nice but there was a shadow effect to the left because I placed the lighting source on the right side. Despite the shady pictures, the position of the balls was discrete. I was able to plot the positions of the balls using Video Point. Then I later plotted a graph of the y-values, height, versus time using Graphical Analysis and fit a quadratic line to it. I found out that there were not enough data points.

    I took more shots of my bouncing balls. This time I laid the camera on its side so that I would so I would have a longer vertical view rather than a horizontal view. This would enable me to get more frames of the tennis ball. I also added another light source to increase the exposure and reduce the shadowing effect. (see diagram 1.1 and 1.2) I uploaded the clips and cut out the clips that were usable. This time, just as I predicted, I got more frames of the tennis ball after the collision. The only inconvenience is that I had to turn my head side ways in order to view the dropping effect.

    I used Video Point and Graphical Analysis to analyze these clips also. I analyzed the numbers and decided to depend on this clip to give me the answer to my goal question.