Color Physics @Hampshire, Day 14

On day 14, in preparation for an activity of making holograms, Prof. Wirth gave a mini lecture on interference of light, its use in early color photography, and its application to holography.

After that, we continued our exploration of subtractive mixing with filters.  Students worked through a worksheet in which  they had to answer quantitative and qualitative questions. Among other things, students

• Made predictions about the intensity distribution of transmitted light given a wide-spectrum white light incident on ideal filters with a variety of transmittance curves, and compared them with observations.
• Made predictions about the intensity distribution of transmitted light when colored light is incident on ideal filters with a variety of transmittance curves, and compared them with observations.
• Sketched the transmittance curves for a combination filters.

  

   

• Looked at the real transmittance curves of our filters to understand why not all of the light is blocked by overlapping cyan, magenta, and yellow filters.

At the end, we went over all of the answers as a class.

Materials:

• Color Filters