If you want to take on these weekly assignments, you’ll need a camera with manual control over shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
This is the only requirement for the course, so even if you’ve never taken a photo before in your whole life, you can get yourself a cheap, second-hand DSLR and start learning.
Personally, I’m definitely going to take this opportunity to learn as much as I possibly can. Imagine how much this information would cost you if you went to Stanford!
I have retired from Stanford to lead a team at Google. My team is in Google Research, and we work broadly on cameras and photography. One of our projects was burst-mode photography for Project Glass. See also this talk. More recent projects include HDR+ mode for Nexus smartphones (see this SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 paper) and the Camera2application programming interface (API) for Android devices. This API is based on the Stanford Frankencamera project. See also this talk. My team also worked on underlying technologies for Project Jump, a light field camera that captures stereo panoramic videos for VR headsets such as Google Cardboard. See this May 2015 presentation at Google I/O. Although I am Emeritus, I have been recalled to active to advise my existing students. I will unfortunately not be offering CS 178 (Digital Photography) again at Stanford. However, this course was given at Google in Spring of 2016, and the lectures were recorded for free public distribution. Here is a link. I will also not be taking on any new PhD students, or supervising summer interns. I will hold semi-regular office hours during the academic year, but not during the summer.
You will find the free course here.
