
Stanford CS course on digital photography - United857
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs178-11/
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nl
Here's the Harvard Extension School digital photography course:
<http://tv.cse7.org/2010/fall/>

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SoftwareMaven
That is cool. I am really liking the democratization of information and (to a
lesser extent) knowledge that the Internet has brought.

Very neat to see this in the CS department, with the added technical aspects
the art school would miss.

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te_chris
It's funny you say that about the added technical stuff, I was looking through
it hoping the that the Art dept. had done the same thing with more of the
artistic/compositional technique stuff and less of the technical stuff.

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SoftwareMaven
Art department almost always have photography classes (which, today, would be
digital). Being a photographer, I've always wanted to know more about the
algorithms used so I could bend them to my will more fully.

The meta-advantage of the CS one is it makes seem CS practical: see, it's not
just fiddling with computers.

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luke_s
As somebody interested in photography, this is really useful.

I'm wondering if anybody else is interested in working through the 'course'.
We could do a lecture and an exercise each week, then setup some kind of
discussion forum? I know it would probably improve my photography a lot.

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phillmv
I don't think it's going to make you a better photographer necessarily, but
maybe you'll come out a better editor.

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luke_s
How so? I took a (very) quick look through the lecture notes and exercises and
they seemed to relate mainly to the art of taking photos. The first exercise
seems to be about learning to use aperture, focus, and shutter speed to
produce different effects. The first lecture is about "natural & linear
perspective, pinholes and lenses, aperture, shutter, motion blur, depth of
field, ISO" which is pretty much what I would expect of a photography course.

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phillmv
Right. Well, with a digital camera you can probably figure out all of that on
your own just by futzing around with the camera for a weekend.

The difficult part comes in understanding light and understanding composition,
neither of which the course really seems to talk about.

No one has ever needed to know about 3d colourspaces (
[http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs178-11/applets/locus....](http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs178-11/applets/locus.html)
) in order to take a good picture. However, good editing is about 30% of the
effort behind a good photo; you might come out a better PHOTOGRAPHER but your
photos won't necessarily be that much improved.

Anyways, the secret is to look at what other people are doing and to take as
many pictures as possible.

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tintin
The HDRI shot on top of the site is very nice! But I don't understand why
these shots are still not possible with current camera's. If you take a
picture with the longest exposure time wouldn't it be possible to dim the
brightest areas using a formula?

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sp332
If you overexpose that part of the sensor, it simply records the maximum
value. Then when you "dim" it later, you just get a blank grey area. In order
to extract detail, you have to maintain some contrast between "bright" and
"really bright", so you have to keep the "bright" area below the maximum value
of the sensor.

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tintin
But doesn't a camera sample pixels at a given rate? So lets say a camera can
access image data from the sensor @ 100Hz and you store this over time
(exposure time) it doesn't matter how bright areas are. But I can be
completely wrong. Maybe I'm confusing frame-rate (video ability) with the
sensor burst-rate.

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artmageddon
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by sampling pixels, but the parent's post
is saying that some areas are very bright while some areas are very dark, like
you see in the HDR shot.. but the sensor doesn't know which of the two light
levels you want to adjust it for, so it makes a best-guess based on your
camera settings.

Example: while our eyes are much more advanced than any camera; think of the
effect of having a giant spotlight shined directly* into your eye: You can see
the light, but everything else is going to be much darker in comparison. If
you look at it long enough, eventually all you're going to see is just the
spot-light, everything else around you will be dark. Much like your eye, this
is exactly what would happen to your picture if you make the exposure time
long enough.. and it doesn't take very long, even 0.25 or 0.5 seconds of time
can ruin a picture taken outdoors.

To answer your original post: a lot of DSLRs nowadays DO have features that do
this, called "Bracketing" mode where it'll take the same picture with low,
mid-range, and high exposure levels(hence the "high dynamic range" name). From
there, you combine the three pictures(or more) in photoshop or other software
and you get that resulting image that you see. In the low mode, you'll be able
to see the foreground while the background is mostly white, the middle level
will have both areas show but with not-too-pleasing colors, while the high
level will show the background, but the foreground will appear completely
dark.

*personal experimentation from long ago has shown that this isn't advisable :)

Edit: I should add that bracketing is just a special feature that takes the
pain out of having to set the exposure time and aperture(how wide open the
lens is when shooting), but these kinds of HDR shots are perfectly capable
with any camera(yes, even the pocket-sized ones) if you have control over
these settings. Knowing how to use the camera is key(along with keeping it
perfectly still).

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tintin
_"I'm not entirely sure what you mean by sampling pixels"_

I think I'm confusing some things. I can understand that each pixel of a
sensor can output values from lets say 0 to 1V where 0V is dark, 1V is light.
So you need a shutter-time because else the sensor will only output values of
1V.

I was thinking todays cameras can sample these values at a very high frame-
rate. So when you sample these values over time and store them you can expand
the range. But it seems like "bracketing" is doing something like this. I did
not know. Thanks for the info!

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grecy
I've always found this interesting too, especially when a RAW file grows in
size with exposure time... doesn't that indicate it is "sampling" the sensor?

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DocSavage
Of particular interest to me was their open platform for computational
photography including the Frankencamera and the FCam API:

<http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/>

A free paper published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications:

<http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/camera20/>

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Yhippa
This is really good stuff! I love the first lesson: "Bad Photos". Having taken
a photography class and dabbling with it that is one of the best ways to start
getting to know the capabilities of your camera.

After working through the assignments you should have a pretty solid
portfolio.

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jacobolus
I recommend Dick Lyon’s lectures to Google engineers a few years ago about
“photographic technology”. <http://www.dicklyon.com/phototech/>

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shuaib
On a slightly related note, does anyone know of a good online course on pencil
sketching? Google didn't help me.

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microcentury
If you find one I would be interested, as I've also searched for this without
success.

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icegreentea
Try digging around here: <http://forums.cgsociety.org/> Go down to General
Techniques and look around. Mostly focused on cg art stuff, but there's quite
a bit of traditional stuff (mostly focused on anatomy/figure drawing, but
there is other stuff). Not exactly a class, but they have workshops that get
started up from time to time that you follow along with.

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maurits
In all honesty, I do not think a photography class that is recreational should
be part of the official curriculum.

Seriously, the Harvard course advertises itself with "what the difference
between sports mode and portrait mode on the camera's dial is"

I love photography, I think it is good you can take classes and have fun (even
though much of the course content you can learn yourself easily), but for
academic credit on a school of engineering, no.

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wladimir
I think it's good that students get the chance learn some things outside their
immediate subject area. Some experience in the more creative areas such as
photography and design can't hurt, even for a CS student. You never know when
it will come in handy.

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maurits
Sure, I have done many elective classes including a couple on a military
academy. The latter helps me understand the evening news a lot better. But my
degree was in engineering and as such, all these other useful classes did not
count as official part of my curriculum. And rightly so, I believe.

