High School Photo Winner's Showcase

School: Elsik High School

Teacher: Ms. Hernandez

The name of my photo is Wavy Guitar. Since the guitar waves aren't able to be seen with the naked eye, I needed an excessive amount of sunlight and an iPhone 5 camera to capture the waves of the guitar. The physics principle depicted in the picture is waves. In order to produce these waves on the guitar, I simply strummed all the strings simultaneously and captured the photo instantly after I had strummed the strings. The picture depicts 6 waves on an acoustic guitar. The B and high E strings (the last two thinner strings on the right) are less noticeable, however if you look closely you can see their shadow on the wooden neck of the guitar. There are many components of a wave that are evident in my photograph. If one was to look closely, they would notice that each string has its own frequency. Each string has its own thickness or thinness which causes it to have its own frequency. As a result, the pitches of each string differ from each other. The low E string (farthest left) evidently has the lowest frequency, thus producing a low 'bassy' tone. On the other hand, the high E string (farthest right) has the highest frequency, thus producing a high pitched tone. The amplitude of each string is inversely related to the frequency of each string. The higher the amplitude of the string causes a lower frequency of the string. The wavelength, trough, and crest are also evident on the waves of the strings.