Streaks of MotionSanjith KalpatAward: Top 100
School: andover high school Out on a car ride in the night, looking for cool places to shoot blurred motion photos with my camera and tripod, I looked at a highway below and asked my dad to stop. While the car's taillights were on--emitting a red light onto the grated fence--I fixed the camera on the tripod and set my shutter speed to about 4 seconds to eventually capture trails of light from the cars below. This photo that captures the light trails of vehicles with the help of the shutter speed, also highlights concepts like constant velocity, relative motion, and reference frames. With the camera's digital sensor being exposed to light for around 4 seconds, it is shown that the vehicles in motion emit continuous "streaks" because they are moving at nearly constant velocity--a state where an object travels in a straight line with constant speed and direction. Over the duration of the exposure, the light from both head and taillights trace a path that represents this form of motion. The fence in the foreground remains sharp and focused because it is stationary relative to the also stationary camera. The dynamic between still and moving objects presents the ideas of relative motion and reference frames. All motion is relative, or in other words, motion is always described with respect to a specific frame of reference--the perspective of another object. In this case, the camera is the frame, capturing the relative movement of cars while ignoring stationary objects like the fence. 
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