Date:
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
What to Study:
- Tessellation Vocabulary
- Blog post: Nov.11
- Blog post: Nov. 06
- Blog post: Nov. 03
***You will not be able to use your notes for this Exam***
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Tessellations Exam
***You will not be able to use your notes for this Exam***
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Revolution in Photography - The Atlantic
The Revolution in Photography - The Atlantic
Bryan Christie
A new camera captures hundreds of images and lets you choose your own reality
By
Bryan ChristieWhen a set of online teasers for a new camera called the Lytro appeared earlier this year, you could have been forgiven for seeing the invention as just another gimmick. The camera’s attention-grabbing feature is a kind of after-the-fact autofocus: with a click, any blurry portion in a picture can be snapped into sharpness—another step in the march of idiot-proof photography.
In fact, such image correction is merely a side effect of what is genuinely different about the technology. The Lytro, scheduled to reach buyers early next year, creates a wholly new kind of visual object, one that both exemplifies and exploits the way images are consumed in the digital era.
The underlying technique is called “light-field photography.” A traditional camera, of course, captures light reflected off its subject through a lens and onto a flat surface. Proper focus is important to ensure that the image you get is the precise slice of visual reality you want. But “computational photography,” pioneered by Marc Levoy of Stanford University and others, takes a different approach, essentially using hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene and processing the results into a many-layered digital object. One of Levoy’s former students, Ren Ng, added the twist that resulted in the Lytro: instead of using multiple cameras, he integrated hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.
The upshot is a photograph that’s less a slice of visual information than a cube, from which you can choose whichever layer would make the most pleasing two-dimensional image for printing and framing. But you can also leave the picture as it is—a three-dimensional capture suitable for digital display or distribution—and let others do the fiddling. Rather than a definitive, static image, a light-field visual object is intrinsically interactive.
In the pictorial examples the Lytro company has released online, this flexibility comes across as a fun novelty: you can focus on the Empire State Building in the distance, or the raindrop-splattered window in the foreground. But the implications are more profound. “It’s fair to say that this technology is a game changer,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, a photographer and assistant professor of new media at the University of California at Berkeley. The company gave Hernandez a Lytro prototype to beta test, and he argues that it represents as important a breakthrough as auto-focus itself, or even the great shift to digital photography.
Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”
Hernandez admits to mixed feelings about this, and suspects many photographers will find it threatening. “In some sense, you’re losing that control,” he says. On the other hand, he notes, the technology enables the creation of a new kind of image, whose full meaning actually requires viewer interaction. “I’ve already been thinking about the crazy things you could do with this.”
That’s what Lytro’s founder, Ng, wants to hear. As he puts it, “You inherently want to click on a Lytro image and discover things in it. Crafting that moment of discovery becomes a new kind of picture-taking.” He adds that the first Lytro models—priced between $399 and $499—will be accessible to mainstream consumers and pros alike.
Given that most photographic images these days are viewed onscreen and never printed (let alone framed), our expectations about what a photograph can be were bound to come into question. The Lytro camera is about to offer us one compelling answer.
In fact, such image correction is merely a side effect of what is genuinely different about the technology. The Lytro, scheduled to reach buyers early next year, creates a wholly new kind of visual object, one that both exemplifies and exploits the way images are consumed in the digital era.
The underlying technique is called “light-field photography.” A traditional camera, of course, captures light reflected off its subject through a lens and onto a flat surface. Proper focus is important to ensure that the image you get is the precise slice of visual reality you want. But “computational photography,” pioneered by Marc Levoy of Stanford University and others, takes a different approach, essentially using hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene and processing the results into a many-layered digital object. One of Levoy’s former students, Ren Ng, added the twist that resulted in the Lytro: instead of using multiple cameras, he integrated hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.
The upshot is a photograph that’s less a slice of visual information than a cube, from which you can choose whichever layer would make the most pleasing two-dimensional image for printing and framing. But you can also leave the picture as it is—a three-dimensional capture suitable for digital display or distribution—and let others do the fiddling. Rather than a definitive, static image, a light-field visual object is intrinsically interactive.
In the pictorial examples the Lytro company has released online, this flexibility comes across as a fun novelty: you can focus on the Empire State Building in the distance, or the raindrop-splattered window in the foreground. But the implications are more profound. “It’s fair to say that this technology is a game changer,” says Richard Koci Hernandez, a photographer and assistant professor of new media at the University of California at Berkeley. The company gave Hernandez a Lytro prototype to beta test, and he argues that it represents as important a breakthrough as auto-focus itself, or even the great shift to digital photography.
Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”
Hernandez admits to mixed feelings about this, and suspects many photographers will find it threatening. “In some sense, you’re losing that control,” he says. On the other hand, he notes, the technology enables the creation of a new kind of image, whose full meaning actually requires viewer interaction. “I’ve already been thinking about the crazy things you could do with this.”
That’s what Lytro’s founder, Ng, wants to hear. As he puts it, “You inherently want to click on a Lytro image and discover things in it. Crafting that moment of discovery becomes a new kind of picture-taking.” He adds that the first Lytro models—priced between $399 and $499—will be accessible to mainstream consumers and pros alike.
Given that most photographic images these days are viewed onscreen and never printed (let alone framed), our expectations about what a photograph can be were bound to come into question. The Lytro camera is about to offer us one compelling answer.
Rob Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Design Observer.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Tessellations
The word tessellation comes from the Latin Tessella, which was a small Square stone or tile used in ancient Roman mosaics. Tiles and Mosaics are common synonyms for tessellations. A plane tessellation is a pattern made up of one or more shapes, completely covering a surface without any gaps or overlaps. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Some shapes, or polygons, will tessellate and others will not. As for the regular polygons, tessellations can easily be created using squares, equilateral triangles and hexagons. I choose to use the equilateral triangle because of the unique visual arrangements it seems to lend itself to. It seems to both perplex and then amaze first the creator and then the viewer.
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Thursday, November 3, 2011
Happy Birthday, Walker Evans!
Walker Evans
(born: Nov. 3, 1903 - died: April 10,1975)
Walker Evans’ influence on photography during the second half of the 20th century was perhaps greater than that of any other figure. His most characteristic pictures show quotidian American life during the second quarter of the century, especially through the description of its vernacular architecture, its outdoor advertising, the beginnings of its automobile culture and its domestic interiors.
(born Nov. 3, 1903, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died April 10, 1975, New Haven, Conn.) He rejected the prevailing highly aestheticized view of artistic photography, of which Alfred Stieglitz was the most visible proponent, and constructed instead an artistic strategy based on the poetic resonance of common but exemplary facts, clearly described. His most characteristic pictures show quotidian American life during the second quarter of the century, especially through the description of its vernacular architecture, its outdoor advertising, the beginnings of its automobile culture, and its domestic interiors. To find out more about Walker Evans Click on the link below:
Walker Evans Biography
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| A Miner''s Home, vicinity Morgantown, West Virginia. 1935 |
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| untitled (Barber shop interior, Atlanta, Georgia), March 1936© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art |
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| Shack and Ice Machine, Old Lyme, Connecticut, April 1973. (©Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). |
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