photographer's diary
a day-to-day photo blog of what and where
photographer Bruce Behnke is shooting,
from both in front of and behind the lens
…the end of our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.
~T.S. EliotJune, 2009
All images in "A Photographer's Diary" are copyrighted by Bruce Behnke, 2009. Use with express permission only. Prints and licensed use rights may be obtained from: Pacific Rim Photography.
Answer to May, 2009 Extra Credit Question:
Local shape is not determined uniquely by shading. This leads to a wrong interpretation of shape by the human visual system when only shading information is present. Extracting shape from shading is not a trivial task; the only input of the visual system is the luminance data, determined by the surface orientation, the direction of the illumination and the surface properties.
When we interpret a shaded picture as three dimensional, our visual system needs to guess the position of the light source in order to resolve a complex convex-concave ambiguity. For more than a century, psychologists have known that the visual system assumes that light comes from above and have argued that this assumptions is ecologically justified because our everyday light source, the sun, is overhead. When the light, in fact, comes from another direction, (as when an image is inverted or rotated) we may make the wrong assumptions about local shape.
June 6, 2009
New South Wales, Australia
Oceanside Lichen
Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia
June 13, 2009
Fruit Bats
Royal Botanical Garden
Sydney, Australia
The Great American West
