Moose Tracks and a Lesson on Eyes vs. Cameras

A couple of days ago I was walking down a trail to one of my favorite fishing spots in all of Maine. Along the trail I saw a bunch of moose tracks. I did my best to get a good picture of them. Unfortunately, like all pictures of moose tracks that I've taken over the years, the pictures I took didn't capture the size and detail of the tracks as I well as I would have liked. That frustration reminded me of a TED-Ed lesson that explains why our eyes see things differently than our cameras capture them. 

Eye vs. Camera is a fascinating TED-Ed lesson. In the lesson we learn why our eyes don't always see things the same way that they're captured with a camera. Through the lesson we learn how our eyes perceive and focus on colors compared to a camera. We also learn fun facts like why we can't watch our own eyes shift from side to side in a mirror. The full lesson can be seen here. The video is embedded below.

TED-Ed offers some resources to extend the lesson. Optical Illusions and Phenomena will show students more examples of how eyes perceive light and color differently than is captured by a camera. 

When You Give a Kid a Camera

Last year we gave our daughters (four and five years old) a couple of kid-friendly digital cameras. My daughters love taking pictures with their little cameras and take them on almost every hike, trip to the wildlife park, and just about every new place that we visit. 

My daughters little cameras store roughly 800 pictures before they have to be transferred to a computer or deleted. After a hike on Sunday their cameras were full and I had to transfer some pictures to my laptop so that they can take more pictures when we go to the zoo. 

It was while looking through the 800 pictures they took that it dawned on me that they value of their cameras for us as parents is to get some insight into how our kids view nature and what they think is interesting. Aside from pictures of fingers partially covering the lens and blurry shots of feet there were lots of pictures of rocks they found interesting, close-ups of flower petals, pictures of worms and bugs, and some pictures of our dogs. 

Now that their cameras have more storage space, we're off to the zoo. I can't wait to see the pictures they take there! More importantly, I can't wait to hear them talk about the pictures that they took and why they took them. I guess you could say we're starting to dive into the world of digital storytelling.