Students Portfolio

Iris Sun

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:19:05 -0400

After traveling through Europe during the one-week breaks, Barcelona still has to be my favorite. The wonderful weather, efficient metro transportation, and the constant barrage of new things to do on a daily basis makes all other cities pale in comparison.  Computational photography was one of the "Barcelona-s" of classes this summer-- one that certain people sat in on even if they weren't in the class. It gave a different perspective behind all of the work that goes into pictures (from the camera to the computer), and really explained exactly what goes on in those commonly used Photoshop functions. The photo I chose to use was the last assignment of the class-- the "camera obscura" assignment. I chose this specific picture for sentimental reasons. The process of setting up the "camera" was a group effort, and I will have fond memories of the hours we spent finding a suitable room, pulling all of the blinds down and blocking all but one source of light, and fumbling around in the dark as we tried to best capture the image projected onto the wall with a borrowed DSLR. The personalization process is what you can see in the picture-- we made shadow puppets, posed like statues in front of the camera, and played with light in order to produce individualized photographs. The light source from the back of the room was purely accidental-- someone walked in while my picture was taking and let in the hallway light-- but I love the addition it made to the story behind the picture, and to the picture itself.

Richard Owen

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:11:05 -0400

Barcelona was amazing! I particularly enjoyed how the classes were an integral part of learning about the city. Because of CS 4475, I now have a much better undertanding how my personal camera works, so I now know what settings to change to make a good photo. - Unfortunately, this also means that I now want a nice SLR camera.

The attached photo was from our camera obscura assignment. I this assignment, we turned our room into a giant camera. We blacked out all of the windows except for one small hole, which allows light (and an image) to pass through it and be projected onto the wall. Since the projected image on the wall would be inverted, this photo has been flipped vertically. Also, keep in mind that this image is not very bright, so we had to increase the exposure time and the iso as much as we could to produce a quality image. I chose this photo for my portfolio because it demonstrates our new understanding of cameras and how they work. From taking the class, I knew that there would technically be an image on the wall, but I didn't realize that we would actually be able to capture that image until doing this assignment.

Naomi Robert

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:14:33 -0400

I have selected my morphing assignment, because I really liked the end result. For this assignment, we used two similar-looking photographs, in my case one of a cute little cat and the other of the Japanese good-luck charm Maneki Neko, and morphed one image until it resulted in the other. This is accomplished by identifying similar triangles on each photograph. So for instance, I selected the same triangle point on each image where the cat?s nose was. Then, you blend the image as a function of time, blending both the relative position of the triangles in the image as well as the color at the position. I ended up with a video showing a very smooth morph from a real cat to Maneki Neko. I selected this assignment because I really enjoyed writing the code to make it, and I think it came out very well.

Studying in Barcelona has been a wonderful experience. I love both the city and how close-knit all of the students and professors have become in the BCN program. I also really enjoyed CS 4475, mainly because I learned so much about photographs and how to manipulate them to achieve various results. Probably the coolest thing I learned in the class was how to think geometrically about projections and calculations. I really enjoyed learning the math behind how to project a photograph onto a sphere, or how to calculate the height of a person in a photograph. The math was a little challenging to understand at first, but once I understood it, it was very rewarding to be able to think mathematically about how to alter a photograph. The class gave me a whole new lens to view the world with my camera, and now when I go out to take photographs, I see so many more possibilities.

Brittany Churchill

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:17:51 -0400

The Barcelona program was amazing. I loved that we were able to spend so much time in one place and be more than just tourists for the whole summer.

I really enjoyed computational photography because it taught me a lot about processing without keeping me trapped in my bedroom coding all day. Looking back at where I started with coding this summer, I'm amazed at some of the assignments I've completed.

I chose this photo as my favorite because I'm a Mechanical Engineer with a Computer Science minor and this assignment combined both of them. For this assignment we had to use pitch and yaw in order to correct the pictures with our code. So it combined dynamics and computational photography! And I now have a nice picture of the view from my room too!

Anjamarie Gaztambide

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:33:21 -0400

Barcelona, from the very fist day I got on that bus from the airport that was taking me to my new home for the next 11 weeks I knew I was going to love Barcelona. The architecture, the people, the music, the passion, the warmth, the weather, the creativity, the culture, the food, the soccer, the dancing, and more than anything the way this is a city design specifically for its citizens and visitors to enjoy, are some of the many things that have made me fall in love with and are going to make me miss Barcelona.

Computational Photography is a class that took something I loved and turned it into a challenge. I have always loved photography but I never experienced it with programming. This class gave me the chance to learn programming in a completely new environment and way. It was a perfect balance between learning to take new interesting pictures, while being in one of the best cities in the world and taking them and editing them with coding. I personally did not know anything about programming and have never really been interested since I am an architecture major, but there is no better way of learning it than the way we did this summer.

This image I selected is part of a “David Hockney” project we had to do over one of our free breaks. David Hockney is a famous pop artist that use to work frequently with collages of image to compose a bigger image. The professor gave us the chance to do this project during our week of travel because we had the opportunity to make our collage based on famous and amazing cities in Europe. In my case I chose Venice. The interesting thing about this picture is that this assignment was originally set to be one single place compiled of many images of that same place. I on the other hand decided to play and twist the rules a little bit and decided to take completely different pictures of different places in Venice and created my own plaza/canal on Venice. I selected this image because I really enjoyed going through my trip?s pictures and thinking how I could put them together in order to achieve the result I wanted. I was really satisfied with the result because if I hadn’t told anyone that all the pictures are from a different place in Venice they would have never known. It was like my own little secret and before doing the assignment I researched David Hockney and got inspired and motivated to challenge myself and try to be as creative as possible to try to learn what being “Hockney” could feel like...

Kelly Snyder

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:16:51 -0400

Overall this class was lots of fun and taught us how to create some really cool photographic effects. As an avid user of photoshop it was very interesting to learn the type of code that goes into making it and learning to do things that went beyond what you can do in any standard graphics editor. For this assignment we took several pictures and ran them through code that averaged them all together into one picture. I chose to use 22 screenshots I took from the game Portal 2 and tried to center the blue and orange portals in approximately the same spots, creating a tunneling effect. I selected this assignment in particular because I feel it turned out very well and made a cool effect even though the code to make it was fairly simple.

Taylor Brownlow

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:11:15 -0400

This image is an average of 10 Barcelona alleys. I had to make sure each image had the horizon aligned properly and use Processing to blend each together. Furthermore, I think the image effectively depicts how each alley can be so similar in design (tall surroundings, deep shadows), but carry its own character(store fronts, people, color).
One of the best things about Barcelona was getting lost in these back alleys and learning how to find your way out; it allows you to see a new side of the city around each corner. In a city full of world-renown attractions, sometimes the best kept secrets can be the most fulfilling.
In CS 4475 I learned to take different styles of pictures since we are utilizing various editing techniques. The assignments require you to put on different filters as you walk through the city and experience life in Barcelona.

Branon Lyle

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:34:50 -0400

This image is an average of images taken while walking toward and through the Arc de Triomf from both Barcelona North and South. I selected it because I like the blurring effect created from the different images being averaged and the structure of the photo with the green average of foliage on the sides and the Arc along the top and the center of the photo. I actually had other cool average images, one of a time-lapse of the Espanya metro stop. I'm including it also. If anything, I learned how simple it is to actually average multiple images together.

The BCN program allows you to live in one of the greatest cities in the world, while providing extensive breaks for traveling around Europe. Even while traveling in different parts of Europe though, you develop an appreciation for Barcelona and, when returning to the city, a since of real belonging and love for the city that inevitably becomes your European home. In terms of the program itself, the classes are interesting and offer opportunities to further explore the city. The people on the program are amazing, professors and students alike. It is small enough so that everyone knows everyone within a few weeks and there is a mingling of majors, especially CS and Architecture, that occurs rarely at Tech. Oh, and the cafe at UPC has chocolate croissants!

To be honest, I developed a greater appreciation for Matlab. It makes no sense to deal primarily with arrays of pixel values and to use JAVA to due array manipulations. Although, I realize the reason for this - Processing is a free download. I had never used Processing before, though I knew JAVA. So learning some Processing functionality is a definite asset of this class. I definitely appreciate the wide variety of photography topics that were explored this semester. My favorite assignments were the averaging assignment, the slit-scan assignment, and the Hockney collage assignment. It was interesting to learn about the specific transformation needed to affect images. I likely would have included the pinhole assignment as a favorite had I had more time to execute the assignment and be more creative. For some of the assignments, the camera limitation was very frustrating and this was evident int the pinhole assignment. I also enjoyed the environment created by having experienced "coders" and "non-coders." I enjoyed helping people implement programs (when I could), even though it was challenging at times.

Jamie Crabb

Fri, 27 May 2011 14:18:00 -0400

The Barcelona Program has been the highlight of my college experience so far! I love Barcelona. The people and atmosphere here are wonderful. Not only did I learn a lot while I was here about CS and architecture, I made new friends that I will be able to see at Tech this fall and created lasting memories while traveling around Europe. The classes were very useful to my field of study, as well as interesting and fun to take.

Computational Photography challenged me to take better pictures and learn about the mechanics of photography, while advancing my knowledge of image manipulation. This class will count toward my CS minor and has left me with great pictures to take back home.

I loved the first assignment we were given. As we wondered around Barcelona our first week, I searched for examples of contrast. On my way to the beach (conveniently located very close to our residence) I stumbled upon the perfect building to photograph. We then played with that image in Processing, a Java-based image manipulation language, to learn more about the behind-the-scenes mechanics of photography.