An introduction to the scientific, artistic, and computing aspects of digital photography. Topics include lenses and optics, light and sensors, optical effects in nature, perspective and depth of field, sampling and noise, the camera as a computing platform, image processing and editing, and computational photography. We will also survey the history of photography, look at the work of famous photographers, and talk about composing strong photographs.
This course is based on CS 178 (Digital Photography), which I taught at Stanford from 2009 through 2014. I revised and taught the course again at Google in Spring of 2016, and these web pages are from the Google version. The course consists of 18 lectures. The topics, with dates, are given in the course schedule. The lectures were delivered live on Google’s Mountain View campus, broadcast live to Google offices around the world, and recorded for later playback. The videos linked into these web pages are from those recordings, edited slightly to remove discussion of Google internal projects. Keynote slides from these lectures were converted to PDF files and linked into the schedule after each lecture.
I am making these materials freely available, but some of the photographs included in the lectures are individually copyrighted. It should be fine for teachers to re-use this material under fair use, but other uses may be protected. If you re-use the material in substantially the same form it is given here, I would appreciate an acknowledgement.
Movies and TV shows tend to use real food when they can, but there are a number of times when they need something fake. We spoke with two fake food artists who specialize in making custom, inedible treats for restaurants, trade shows, and Hollywood. Here’s how fake food props are made to look so delicious.
Box explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.
The fields of graphic design and semiotics are inextricably linked. In this way, the first logo creators were most likely the ancient Egyptians, who designed images to convey socio-cultural values and established visual codes of representation. But as the industrial revolution began to give rise to consumer culture as we know it, logo design remained mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.
Then came Paul Rand with his iconic rendering of the IBM logo in 1956. Many design historians see this as the definitive turning point in logo design. Shortly thereafter, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded a design firm that would take things one step further.
Diana Smith makes web images unlike any you’ve probably seen before. That’s because when you’re looking at one of the user interface designer’s creations, you’re not looking at flat pixel data fetched from a server—you’re looking at pure code, rendered live before your very eyes.
Smith’s “Pure CSS Francine,” an elaborate code-drawing in the style of an 1800s oil painting, caused web developers on Twitter to have a meltdown this week. The work was not drawn with a tablet, or a mouse, or even using illustration software. Instead, Smith coded every element by hand in HTML and CSS, computer languages that tell your browser how to display web pages. This means that there is no “image” to save as a file when you view Pure CSS Francine on the web, but you can screenshot it or download the code and play around with it yourself.