Chapter Two. Learning to See

Before we begin looking at the technology that one can use to capture and manipulate images, it seems appropriate to get a better understanding of imagery in general—to look at how our eyes and our brains interact with the visible world. We also need to discuss the devices we have developed to capture a portion of the visible world—their characteristics and limitations.

Although most of us spend our whole lives looking at the world around us, we seldom stop to think about the specifics of how the brain perceives what our eyes see. Most of the time it immediately reduces everything to some kind of symbolic representation, and we never even stop to consider issues such as how the light and shadows in front of us are interacting. ...

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