This WWW site has been created by Professor
Hank Dietz to help organize a club for UK students, faculty,
and staff who are interested in digital photography. This page
is primarily intended for the club's reference materials; see our group on Facebook for the more dynamic content.
There is also an email listserve for the group;
sign-up by sending an email to ListServ@lsv.uky.edu
with no subject and a body containing the line:
Subscribe DPClub
The club began in Fall 2003, and had a bit of a rebirth in Fall of 2010, but is currently dormant awaiting student leadership. However, Professor Hank Dietz is still active in this area. For example, he gave a presentation on The Benefits of Being Out Of Focus: Making the Most of Lens PSF November 11, 2011 at Microsoft Research.
What this club is really about is, of course, up to its members. However, the goal generally is to use and refine the technologies and techniques associated with digital photography for both technical and artistic purposes. Club topics have ranged from technical discussions of how to use the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) to sessions displaying, reviewing, and critiquing each other's attempts at purely artistic photography.
Here are pointers to a few useful resources relevant to digital photography in general. Later, we hope to have a much more complete set of reference materials on this site. Most of the local research on Digital Imaging Technologies is posted at http://aggregate.org/DIT/.
This club is the direct response to the interest generated by the short course Introduction To Digital Photography (PDF slides) which Professor Hank Dietz gave as part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department's EDay2003 activities. Dietz has a long history in photography. He was photo editor for his high school newspaper and yearbook, also for Columbia University's Broadway Magazine. Aside from school-related publications, his work has appeared in places ranging from news photos in the New York Times to a full-page color ad for Hammacher-Schlemmer in the Saturday Evening Post. Since becoming a computer engineer, he has continued his interest in photography as both a hobby and a source of new directions for his research. As early as the mid 1980s, Dietz researched and published on digital halftoning techniques; his more recent work includes computational video walls, 360-dgree high-resolution digital imaging, 3D capture, and various methods to improve image quality for consumer digital cameras.
As a once professional photographer who prided himself on his traditional photographic darkroom skills, it is Dietz's opinion that digital cameras and processing now yield competitive or superior results for most uses. As his collection of digital cameras has grown, so has the layer of dust on his 35mm and large-format cameras. As of 2009, however, his collection of old lenses is no longer dusty and is growing rapidly. ;-)
![[A NEW WAY TO IMAGE]](/DPCLUB/newimagesm.gif){kind=small}
UK Digital Photography Club