Layers of Reflection by Emily Noelle Fears
Honorable - Contrived Category
School: Ridge High School
Teacher: Matthew Blackman
This photograph demonstrates the reflection and refraction of light when it strikes a boundary between two different materials. To set up the photo, I stacked up several layers of glass, filled the room with fog, and shined a green laser pointer at the top layer. Each time the beam strikes an air-glass boundary, some light is reflected, some is scattered, and the rest is transmitted into the next medium. This causes the beam to divide again and again, splitting up a single incident beam into multiple reflected and transmitted beams. Several of the reflected beams can be seen leaving the stack on the right, each one reflecting from a deeper layer of glass. An array of dots is also visible within the glass, created by the partial scattering of light at each boundary. The overall result is a fractal-like pattern that portrays the beauty and complexity of optics.
