A Student’s Point of View: Only at RIT Photo could enroll in a class like this
Hi everyone. I’m Ashley Crichton writing again for RIT Photo! This week I will be writing about one of the classes I am taking this semester Photographic Instrumentation. It is a class offered in the photo sciences department. It is a class where I learn how to use an Arduino – a device used to program cameras and lights – to take interesting pictures. These pictures could include anything from double water drips, or making a time-lapse movie, or automated light painting. It is the sequential class I took last semester, but this class dives a little more in depth into a lot of the concepts.
One of my favorite labs that we have done in class was the double water drip lab. To do this, we used our Arduino to control when the shutter opened, when the flash went off, and when the water dripped. We had everything time based and not sensor based because water will drip at the same speed every time thanks to gravity. Here is a picture of our setup:
It was a lot of fun to play around with the timing increments between the drips so we could see the different splash timing we could achieve. I made my partner increase the time by one millisecond many times and then take a couple photos at every time interval so I knew what it would look like. My favorite two were 37 and 52 milliseconds between drips. To me, all the water drips looked like people wearing big floppy hats and I had a lot of fun narrating the back stories of these water drips. I also had a lot of fun playing around with the colors and the background to try to make the pictures more interesting. Here are two of the photos we ended up with.
Other fun labs we have done included making a strobe from LED lights and using RGB LEDs to create interesting colors while light painting. For the light painting lab, we wrote a program so that every time we hit a button on the Arduino, it would change colors. It was fun to play around with using those different colors when making the final light painted image. Here is an example of one of the images I made for this lab:
Even though this class is a photo science class and I am an advertising student, I am so glad I am taking it. I love to work with time lapses in my personal work, and I have learned a lot of ways I can use the program to have a repetitive action happen during the time lapse, such as a small drip of water between each frame that is taken. I love being able to cross over into different areas of photography and the number of different things I can explore here at RIT. I am looking forward to the rest of the projects we work on in this class and what I can create with this new knowledge!
Ashley Crichton is a third RIT Photo advertising photography student
