Syllabus * Perspective * Image Formation * Exposure * Choosing a camera

Choosing a camera, the history of photography (part 1), and extreme photography.

Optics I: lenses and apertures. Lenmaker's formulae, ray tracing, lenses & perspective transforms, aperture, and depth of field formulae

Optics II: Practical photographic lenses. Abberations & distortion, glare & flare, vignetting, diffraction, lens design, telephoto & zoom lenses.

History of photography (part 2) and composing good photographs.

Autofocus (AF). Viewfinders, view cameras, tilt-shift lenses, passive vs active autofocusing, phase vs contrast detection. Exposure metering (AE). Dynamic range problem, metering technology.

Sampling and pixels. Resolution and human perception, sampling and aliasing, filtering by convolution, sampling vs quantization.

Photons and sensors. How digital sensors work, CCD vs CMOS, microlenses and antialiasing, color sensing technologies.

Night photography and astrophotography Special effects and trick photography

Noise and ISO. Sources of noise, SNR, dynamic range, ISO, denoising Image Stabilization (IS). Avoiding camera shake, optical stabilization technologies.

History of photography (part 3). Photography as art, genres, Naturalism, Pictorialism. Why is sports photography hard? Solutions based on computational photography.

Color I: trichromatic theory. Color spectra, color sensitivity, color matching, 3D color spaces, additive vs subtractive color mixing

Color II: applications in photography. cylindrical spaces, chromaticity diagrams, color temperature, white balancing, standardized RGB spaces, gamut mapping

History of photography (part 4). photography as a tool, technological improvements, industrial and scientific uses, provoking social reform, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, photographers of the FSA

Light and reflection. Radiometry & photometry, measures of light, diffuse & specular reflection, BRDFs, Fresnel equations

Photographic lighting. Lighting for portraiture, studio lighting, key & fill, flash photography, flash-noflash & multi-flash.

In-camera image processing. Demosaicing, gamma curves, tone mapping, HDR, denoising and sharpening, compression and file formats.

Panoramas. Panoramic cameras, stiching, perspective vs cylindrical History of photography (part 5). The modern age, snapshot photojournalism, post-modernism