Photo Journal

April 23

Our first day, we worked on getting together and setting up the equipment that would be needed. We also confirmed a final plan of what we were going to do and how we were going to take our measurements.

April 26-27

We worked on getting the timing correct using a computer. To get the timing correct we shot the pellet gun and continually adjusted different delays and interval timings. We knew that it was close to being correct when we could see four pellets. Then we took pictures to confirm that we saw four pellets.

With this picture, we measured the distance in between pellets to determine how wide we should just our Jell-O.

May 2

We made a stand to place the Jell-O, to make transferring it to the platform easier. It is a piece of particle board cut down to a small size. We spray painted the stand black, so that it would not show up in the pictures. We decided that we were going to freeze the Jell-O that had already been made.

May 4

We took our first pictures with red, frozen Jell-O. We weren't getting the timing we wanted, so we switched to a piece of masking tape the width of the Jell-O (~4 cm). We found our gun to be very inconsistent. Without changing any settings, the pellets would sometimes show up before and would sometimes show up after the tape. We determined that the only thing that would cause so much inconsistency would be the gun.

May 5

We took ten pictures without changing any conditions in each picture. We found extreme inconsistencies in our pictures. The four pellets would show up in all parts of the frame in a seemingly random way. We decided to try changing our setup to see if we could produce better results. The sound trigger had been taped below the gun, so it could have been picking up vibrations from the table, rather than the actual sound from the gun itself. We taped the sound trigger to the wall so that it wouldn't be affected by the vibrations. To compensate for the sound trigger being farther away, we shortened the time delay. We took five pictures with our new setting and found them to be much more consistent.

May 7

With this timing consistency, we were able to switch back to working with our frozen Jell-O. We discovered a new factor that we hadn't taken into account- the Jell-O melts as time passes.  When the Jell-O was really frozen, the pellets did not move completely through the Jell-O. As the consistency of the Jell-O continued to change, we had to continually adjust our timing. We only got one picture that had two pellets before and two pellets after the Jell-O). Since we were zoomed out so far to make sure we captured the pellets, it was not a very quality photo.

May 10

We continued taking pictures today, and got many analyzable photographs. At the end of our photo shoot, the timing seemed very inconsistent. Perhaps this was because the barrel of the gun was very hot. But it did not matter, because we had enough photos to analyze.

After May 10

We worked on analyzing our photos, our lab report, and our website.

May 25

Everything was completed by this day.