Light Science and Magic 4/e

He felt that shadows were so important to art that, in the outline for his treatise, he planned that the longest section would be on that topic. “Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective, because, without them opaque and solid bodies will be ill defined,” he wrote. “Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The

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To create an extended depth of field, the focus is changed slightly with each shot, but the depth of field remains constant to ensure sharpness between adjacent images. If the depth of field varies, there will be blurred regions in the final processed image. For an HDR image, you expose the scene at multiple exposures without changing the focus or

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The other metric you want to pay attention to is the color rendering index, or C.R.I. This tells you how true or accurate colors appear under the light. A C.R.I. of 100 is as good as it gets. Ms. Madden said that for most settings, you don’t want to drop too far below 90. Otherwise, things start to look weird, like under the security lighting that ... See more

Chromatic aberration is the most pernicious optical problem found in telephoto lenses. There are others, including spherical aberration, astigmatism, coma, curvature of field, and similarly scary-sounding phenomena. The best solution for any of these is to use a better lens that offers the proper degree of correction for aberrations, or stop down t

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