Last updated February 2010
(As of July 2014 I am Emeritus and no longer teaching.
But click here for a
public version of CS 178 (Digital Photography) that includes video
recordings of the lectures.
Or click here for a
YouTube playlist of the lectures.)
The Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has 6 faculty. Together we offer 14 courses in graphics, covering all aspects of the field. Until last year (2008) I taught the introductory course, CS 248. One of the highlights of this course is a video game competition juried by experts from industry and academia. In Autumn 2009 I handed this course off to Vladlen Koltun, For a while I taught the rendering course, CS 348B, which includes an equally exciting rendering competition. However, I handed that course off several years ago to Pat Hanrahan. I also occasionally teach CS 448 - Topics in Computer Graphics, an advanced course with a different topic every quarter. This Winter (2010), the topic is computational photography.
Like many Stanford faculty, I harbor secret passions for fields outside my own. When former Stanford president Gerhard Casper created the Stanford Introductory Studies program, I jumped at the opportunity to teach a course that combines the history of art with the history of science. The result is CS 48N - The Science of Art. It's a seminar-style course intended mainly for freshmen (it requires no programming experience). As students discover when they take the class, one of my favorite topics is the invention of perspective during the Italian Renaissance. Another is the development of color theory.
For a while I was faculty organizer for CS 528 - Broad Area Colloquium for Artificial Intelligence, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics and Vision. Unfortunately, this course is not currently being offered.
Finally, in 2009 I began teaching a new, university-wide undergraduate course on digital photography. It's a comprehensive introductory course, covering the science of imaging, camera technology, the history of photography, great photographers, the rules of composition, etc. Loaner cameras are given to students to need them, and all students are issued a temporary license for Adobe Photoshop. Coursework includes weekly photographic assignments on landscape, portraiture, macro, action and sports, and so on. I'm having a blast teaching this course. Look at the best student photographs from the 2009 version of the course; aren't they amazing?