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Stage Four: Visualising surface vibrations using LED lights

 For the next stage of my cymatics exploration I wanted to connect the work on surface vibration in Stage 3 and the long exposure of light movements in Stage 2. I was inspired by a YouTube video by Ted Klinsman which demonstrated how to photograph vibrations on the surface of water using coloured LED lights. The setup looked simple but took quite a bit of time to get right! I attached an oscillating motor to the stem of a wine glass filled with water dyed black, which caused the glass to vibrate. The speed of this vibration could be controlled by changing the voltage to this motor and so creating different patterns in the water. In addition, changing the shutter speed resulted in different effects.

 

The lighting was created by rigging a neopixel ring close to the axis of the camera lens as it points downwards. I rigged this light to a simple Raspberry Pi computer in order to control the different lights and their point sources and colours. Having the room very dark with the voltage at 3.5V and the shutter speed at 0.5 seconds resulted in the best effects.​

CRITICAL LINKS

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Critical Links.jpg

CONTACT SHEETS

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Animations

As I took a number of still photographs in quick succession, they lent themselves to being animated via stop motion techniques.

 

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