Worlds colliding

We've been avidly watching Marc Levoy's introductory course on digital photography, recently provided online for free by Google. For people like Linton and me who are entering the creative world of photography with scientific backgrounds, finding out more about the physics of optics and the maths behind Photoshop makes it more approachable. I'm guessing we're in a minority!

Last night's episode was especially in our wheelhouse as Marc touched on the psychophysics of vision, or how the human sensory systems gather and interpret information in their environment, and how this impacts things like minimum resolution for displays. Like all things involving the human factor, the physics is the easy part! And even if your eyes glaze over at some of the tricky bits, there's more than enough of interest to keep most photographers engaged with the course.

We're also enjoying the assignments. The first one is to deliberately take some "bad" photos, where "bad" involves breaking the rules and circumventing your camera's default behaviour (e.g., blurred, poorly exposed, poorly composed, out of focus, or wrong white balance). The aim is, of course, to get an artistic shot by breaking the rules — a most satisfying start to what I assumed was going to be a "thou shalt" approach to photography. The sunflower photo above is my take on a "bad" photo. 

Updated 18 April 2026 (minor edits)