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Second Place (tie)

Chien-Wei Han, Pima Community College, Tucson. Chein-Wei's comments: I had to orient my digital camera position so that it is perpendicular to the direction of sunlight and at some angle to get the best details. You can see infer from the shadow in the picture that the sun is coming from the left side. When the sun is near the horizon, like at sunrise or sunset, then the light scattered perpendicularly to the direction of the sun will have maximum polarization as explained by the dipole model. When I was taking the picture of the beach, my camera was facing in a direction perpendicular to the sun with the sun on my left. The light entering the camera was highly polarized and also vertically polarized. Since it was vertically polarized, there is a Brewster’s angle where no light is reflected so there is no glare (or a little glare) off the surface of the water and the camera can see the sand below the surface of the water.