Monday, July 18, 2011

What are good advanced book on the physics and science of photography?

Question

I am looking for books about the physics of DSLR, including modern photography optics and sensor electronics. If I already have some books on optics and electronics, I have found fairly hard to find good resource for these fields taking photography as a basis, with examples taken from photography and chapters dedicated to lenses optics for instance.

So far what I have found is either too generic, or, if dealing with photography, lacks the physical expertise I would like to get (I mean books with equations. Everybody loves them.)

Good books for physics of photography exist, but they are quite old, the last good I have found were written by Kingslake in the 70s and definitely miss the non-optical part, and the optical stuff is a bit old-fashioned now (but very nice books BTW).

To sum up, I would like:

  • Very technical references
  • Dealing with physical issues specific to DSLRs and modern photography, such as diffraction limits, image stabilization, properties of coatings, noise correction - whatever you can think of actually...

Answer

Books by Henry Horenstein are very technical, but are unfortunately more to do with film photography.

Thom Hogan (bythom.com) writes a lot of technical information about sensors. Well technical to most people, not a lot of equations. He references the book Manual of Photography by Ralph Jacobson - "the highly technical and math-filled volume that defines much of the state-of-the-art". Sounds like it might be what you're looking for.

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