on landscape The online magazine for landscape photographers
Category Archives: Science of Photography
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A Look at AI Image Generation

Firstly, a little context and background for just what artificial intelligent image creation actually means, and it’s quite different to how people might imagine it. more

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What You Really See

I believe a deeper understanding of human vision, and the way it interacts with colour management can help us unlock the potential in our images, as we edit, view and print. more

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The Science and Aesthetics of the Hole

We’ve all heard of pinhole photography and many of us have no doubt had a go at it in some form or other, either by building a basic pinhole camera, sometimes by ‘pretending’ to demonstrate to a hand child, or through buying a very expensive “hole enclosure system” (commonly known as ‘a pinhole camera’). more

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Clipping Colour

Whilst taking some test shots in my front garden last week, I noticed something strange going on. It wasn't a problem capturing the images, I remember taking a normal exposure and then taking +1 and +2 brackets and the +2 bracket was obviously clipped on the back of the camera (as shown below). Knowing that the camera clipping indicator lies, I imported the images into Lightroom, set the more

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What’s up with Camera Firmware?

Why should we be so limited by aspect ratio? Ever since the start of photography, cameras have had ‘custom’ aspect ratios. more

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The Focal Length of the Eye

Whilst putting together the pub quiz for our landscape photography conference last year, David Ward and I wanted to add the question "What focal length is the eye?" more

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What’s Up With Camera Firmware?

Exposure controls haven’t really moved on a whole lot since the days of film, apart from perhaps the histogram, an inaccurate way of showing how far wrong the internal meter was. I’m hoping to take you through some of the innovations that I’d like to see in the next range of cameras from the big manufacturers. more

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Memory Colour

Colour - it’s something we sort of take for granted. After all the camera records the correct colour and then we play with it. Right? Well - not actually. Cameras are definitely getting better but they are certainly not perfect yet and if we add in the effects of camera profiles then what we actually see when we load our photos into Lightroom (or whatever) isn’t necessarily what we expect. Many of us think this probably doesn’t matter, after all more

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The Science of Lenses – Part Two

Those Dotted Lines (Astigmatism) OK, we’re back to the dotted lines and these need a little more explanation as they’re quite complicated. I want to show you in a diagram what is happening as a verbal explanation is quite difficult. What I want to show is that for a single point source of light, there are two possible planes in which it can be in focus. Very odd and it took me a while to understand myself but with the more

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The Science of Lenses – Part One

We recently recorded a livestreamed webinar about lenses and although we went overtime by a considerable amount, the interest was very strong. As such we thought it a good idea to go into a little bit more about the science behind lenses without scaring people too much. Hopefully we’ll split the content into ‘easily digested’ with a few separate ‘geeky asides’ for those of you, like me, who like to know what is really going on. The first thing we’ll more

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More Resolution?

There have been two constant declarations from photographers ever since the first digital camera appeared. The first was that they have "more resolution than film!" (even 3mp cameras!) and the second is that "it's as much as we need". As each increase in resolution of digital cameras increase, from 3 to 6 to 8, 10, 12 and more recently 24 and 36 megapixels - a substantial number of photographers would ask "Why do we need such resolution? I print more

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The Science of Autumn

Every autumn we go through the same cycles of: “Autumn is early!”, “Autumn is late!”, “It looks like a good one coming”, “The leaves will be gone by November”. Our knowledge of the vagaries of autumnal colour is that loose that we grasp hold of any indicator that might support previous experience or not. I thought that this Autumn I would find out a little bit more about the processes behind our arboreal splendor and try to use this knowledge more

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Landscape Photography and Evolutionary Psychology

When we view any landscape scene, there is some form of emotional response. This article is about the fundamental origins of these reactions – why elements of a captivating landscape photograph such as compositional features, environmental conditions and lighting situations trigger human emotion. Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain why our interpretations and reactions are, to a large extent, universal among modern humans.1 Why, for instance, does an expansive view with a clear focal point, areas of high contrast and more

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An Introduction to Colour

It turns out that if you talk to colour scientists and colour psychologists they’ll tell you that there is no such thing as colour! This article will look a little bit more into that disturbing revelation. more

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What does Sensor Size Affect

We've done a fair bit of camera comparing in On Landscape and one of the things that causes a lot of confusion is how to work out equivalent focal lengths, depth of field, apertures and exposure is the part that sensor size plays in the equation. more

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