CS180 Project 0

Part 1

In this first part, I had a friend take several photos of me using different focal lengths and camera distances. Below are five of the resulting photos, showing a clear change in how my face appears.

I observed that as the focal length decreased (using a wider-angle lens), the image became distorted. It seems that when the camera is too close, my face appears slightly warped, with features closest to the camera appearing exaggerated. The image with the longest focal length appears much more natural.

Part 2

Next, I applied the same procedure to an outdoor urban scene. I took two photos along a path near Stow Plaza with different focal lengths.

By comparing these two photos, I noticed that the image taken with the longer focal length (the first one) looks flattened, as if the space between the foreground (cart) and background (gate) has been compressed. In contrast, the second image, taken with a shorter focal length, does a much better job of showing the depth and distance of the scene.

Part 3

Here, I took 9 photos of the same object and combined them into a .gif file:

It clearly demonstrates the effect where the foreground object appears to stay in place while the background expands.