Stanford CS course on digital photography
graphics.stanford.edu
graphics.stanford.edu
Very neat to see this in the CS department, with the added technical aspects the art school would miss.
The meta-advantage of the CS one is it makes seem CS practical: see, it's not just fiddling with computers.
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.
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.... ) 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.
There is a version 2.0 going on right now too, currently on lesson 4 posted Aug. 12 - http://www.reddit.com/r/PhotoClassRedux/
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).
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!
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/
A free paper published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications:
After working through the assignments you should have a pretty solid portfolio.
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.