Category: Experiments
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The light on the water.
Happiness is the light on the water. -William Maxwell One of our photography groups has been very active in giving us weekend projects to help us through the social isolation. This is the first weekend I’ve been able to take part, and it’s a project I’ve tried before a few years ago but for some…
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Fruit with Cream
The fabulous Julie invited me to her place yesterday (Monday) for a “mystery photo shoot”. She told me to bring my camera and my sense of adventure, nothing else. And she told me nothing, except – it could get messy! She had a bunch of experimental shoots set up and we dove right in. This…
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Oil Slicks
Truth will rise above falsehood, as oil above water. -Miguel De Cervantes There are a bunch more photos I’d love to show you, and I probably will over time, but today I wanted to show you the last ones from our Paint in Water shoot. After it was all over, the water was virtually black…
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More Painted Water.
I am fascinated by this paint-in-water shoot. I spent some time editing all the shots and this series is one of my favourites. I can see some of these as backgrounds, as prints on their own – I’d love to see the first one covering a wall. There are quite a few more I want…
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More Paint Planets, and Some Volcanoes
Following on from yesterday’s post, we took away the red background and replaced it with a white one. We also mixed our primary(ish) colours, to make green and purple as well. I used my Olympus OMD EM5 as usual for these shots, with the 60mm macro lens – it allowed me to get close and…
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Paint Planets 1
After our session with Mixed Fruit on Saturday, Beck and I headed outside. I’d brought three tubes of paint with me – I wanted to try oil paints in water. Beck had a long, tall vase which we could use, so we dived in. We used syringes to squirt the paint into the water. I…
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Dancing Bits and Bobs
For today’s experiment, you can have a lot of fun and you can make a lot of mess. I had fun working out the best things to use here. The original experiment that I remember from when I was at school, used sultanas. The book that I wrote a chapter for said to use spaghetti.…
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Where’s My Coffee ?!?
This is an experiment that you can try with children. It’s super-fun and very fast, so there’s an immediate payoff, and you can run it many times. You can simply run it with the children or you can teach them a little bit about what’s happening, depending on how old they are and how interested…
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Give Me Some Sugar!
For this week’s Scientific Reasoning, I want to talk to you about growing crystals. It seems fitting since last week’s feature was an Interview with Dr Julia Archbold who worked with protein crystals. I work with some scientists who are protein crystallographers. These talented individuals isolate a particular protein and then work out how to…
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My Celery is Thirsty
So today I’m starting my new regular feature – Scientific Reasoning. You can read my reasoning behind starting this feature here. Today I am going to show you a science experiment that you can try at home – with your children or on your own. It’s fun, but also takes a while to run through, probably…
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 