Aim As many other disciplines also the photography presents a technological acceleration that is changing its characters. More than one century was passed from the film photography (Eastman. 1989) to the digital photography (e.g. NikonD1 in the 1999). Twenty years later with the first i-Phone the mobile photographyappeared which is quickly moving to become computational photography: the real image is being to be substitute by the virtual image era. However, since even the computational photography is fed by real images and whatever be the produced images they are always observed through our eyes, it can be of interest to compare all the above mentioned techniques in order to extract the common concepts or, in other terms, in order to extract what remain invariant in the production, registration and perception of the photographic process, whatever it be.  This is the Course aim. To whom is addressed The Course is neither in "Introduction to" Course nor a "how-to" Course. Instead, the Course is addressed to the students that already experienced photography and are interested to learn the theoretical bases of the photography and not a specific technique. The Couse is mainly addressed to curious and motivated students that want to know the key-concepts often jeopardized by a cascade of details and even more complex handbooks. The Course is addressed to graduated students in Design, Architecture and Engineering. Even if the Course deal with complex concepts (kept in prevalence by optical communications and signal theory) it does not require pre-requisites. The study progresses through a journey that compare film, digital, mobile and computational photography. By means of the direct student involvement (students already aware of the photographic language) the journey leads to discovery the fundamental concepts shared by all the photographic techniques in order to learn the theory of the photography.  Contents The photography is based on three pillars: the image formation, the image registration and the image perception. The image formation requires the study of the optical systems and of the diffraction. In the Couse these aspects are faced by means the contemporary methods of Fourier optics and signal theory.;The image registration requires the evaluation of the signal-to-noise ratio. In the Course these aspects are faced by means of the contemporary methods of the optical communications;The image perception deals with the human visual system and control. In the Course these aspects are focused by using the contemporary physiological models and simulators.

dal March 2023 a May 2023