The image being projected is a brightly colored playground topped with frolicking children.

In the next slide, the shot is tighter, showing more closely the little boys who are smiling and laughing as they play.

The third shot zooms in even more. In the dirt beneath the red, yellow and green jungle gym is a pile of cigarette butts. Or are they? A closer look reveals that marijuana was smoked here.

A photo taken by Besart Hajdini, 15, shows the front of his school, Bulkeley High in Hartford, with a patch of green grass in front. The next shot focuses on the grass, and the drug paraphernalia it hides.  "I didn't think there would be something like that right there," Hajdini said.

"Explorations of the Visual'' is a collection of photographs by Hartford youths who examined how the environment can influence an individual to drop out of school. The photos are being displayed at Capital Community College until Jan. 8.

On Thursday night, the exhibit opened with a slide show and a presentation. As participants in the Summer Youth Research Institute with the Institute for Community Research, 40 youths chose to study high school dropouts.

They first had to learn scientific research techniques, then divided into groups to conduct interviews, surveys, mapping and visual research on dropouts. Ten participated in the visual portion, taking the photos for the exhibit.

"The project has to do with art and research, how research can work with art,'' said Victor Pacheco, a prevention research educator with the institute and an artist.
The students were taught how to use 35mm cameras and went to places that dropouts might frequent -- bus stops, parks, corner stores. But all the locations were close to three Hartford high schools -- Weaver, Bulkeley and Hartford Public.
Images are as different as playgrounds, boarded up homes, used condoms, empty alcohol bottles and the fronts of Hartford stores and clubs. Of course, there are the photos of drug paraphernalia, strewn, it would seem, just about everywhere.

"I'd see it around,'' said Jerrod Collins, 16. "But [the project] opened my eyes to the reality. So much is around the neighborhood, it's scary.''

"Most of the stuff we figured out [through the research] I already knew,'' said Sascha Johnson, 15, and a student at Manchester High School. "But I didn't know how much drugs would be found around the schools and parks.''

Hajdini said the items found near the high school help explain why some students leave school.  "They don't concentrate on school because they want to get high,'' he reasoned.

But one student who conducted surveys for the project said the reasons teens drop out sometimes can be more heartrending.  "A lot of teens have family problems and have to sell drugs to support their family,'' said Latoya Knight, 15, a student at Sports Sciences Academy. "It's not right.''

Many of the students involved were still fuzzy on what it all means and what can be done. But they'll be working until April to make sense of all of their data, visual and otherwise, and come up with an action plan to help other teens stay in school.  A high dropout rate remains a problem for Hartford, although the cumulative dropout rate for the Class of 2003, 22.1 percent, was an improvement over the previous year, when the cumulative dropout rate was 29.7 percent.

Collins, who attends Sports Sciences Academy, hopes the exhibit, in a small way, will help. "I hope [the photos] can help people face reality,'' Collins said. "Dropping out is not the thing to do. There are other roads.''

The free exhibit will continue through Jan. 8 and is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Capital Community College, 950 Main St.