Horizon — where it appears
A height, out of one photograph
Four points on a vertical, one cross-ratio, and the height of something nobody measured. The only metric input is the photographer's own eye height, because the horizon is at eye level and that is the one piece of perspective folklore that is exactly true.
A shadow is a second projection
The construction that puts a shadow on the ground is the construction that puts the scene on the picture plane, with the lamp where the eye was. Shadow drawing is taught as a separate set of recipes and it is one operation with the centre moved, which is why the same code draws both.
One, two and three point are one construction
The names count how many vanishing points sit at a finite place in the picture, and the count is a fact about how the object is turned and the camera is aimed. Nothing about the method changes between them, and a vanishing point does not appear — it arrives from infinity.
What a projection destroys
A projection loses length, angle, area and the ratio in which a point divides a segment. Exactly one quantity comes through untouched, and almost everything that can be checked about a picture is checked with it — including, as it turns out, some things it cannot check at all.
The cube that is a box
The two-point cube every book teaches has a step it supplies no construction for. Place the two far edges symmetrically and the drawing depicts a cube for free; place them eight points apart — a difference invisible on the page — and it depicts a box 1.4 times shallower than it is wide.
Where parallel lines meet
They meet at a point that is not in the plane, and the horizon is the line made of all such points. Treating that as bookkeeping misses what it buys — a vanishing point becomes an ordinary point of the picture, findable from the drawn lines, checkable, and enterable into any calculation the others are.
Where shadows vanish
The shadows of parallel posts under the sun meet at a point, and that point must lie on the horizon. Under a lamp they meet at the lamp's foot instead. Both are checkable in any photograph, and a picture whose shadows fail the check was not lit by anything.
Dividing depth by eye
Three methods for spacing a receding row, all of them taught, all of them wrong. Read back as distances, the best misplaces a post by 3.5 metres in a row that is supposed to be spaced 1.4. And the obvious way of checking them gives one of the three a perfect score.
A lens destroys the invariant
The cross-ratio is the one thing a projection preserves, and everything checkable on this site is checked with it. A lens returns it one and a third per cent out where the pinhole is exact to fifteen digits — and the height error that follows tracks a quantity nobody would guess.
The horizon is at eye level — if the picture plane is vertical
The horizon cuts every standing figure at the same fraction of its height however far away it is, which is the most immediately usable fact in the subject. It holds when the camera is level, and a twelve-degree tilt is enough to spread the fractions by more than a percentage point.
The plan hidden in the photograph
Rectifying the ground is the same operation as rectifying a wall, and it turns a photograph into a site plan. The horizon is not an input to it and comes out as a consequence — the plan's points at infinity land on it, at first order, which is the check that the plan is a plan and not a plausible warp.
Alberti draws a pavement, and chooses where the reader stands
The costruzione legittima of 1435 is exact. Run as a construction — with drawn rays and drawn intersections rather than the formula it turns out to satisfy — it agrees with a pinhole camera to six parts in a hundred trillion of a pixel. And it has one free parameter that the recipe never names, which is the distance from the eye to the panel.
The circle whose centre moves
The image of a circle is an ellipse, and the image of the circle's centre is not the centre of that ellipse. The gap is 3 or 4% of the ellipse's width in an ordinary view — large enough to see, small enough to be dismissed as a slip by anyone not expecting it, and the reason drawn wheels look wrong.
When the picture surface is not flat
A flat picture plane keeps straight lines straight and stretches the edges without bound. A cylindrical one spreads the stretch evenly and bends every straight line that is not through the axis. Neither is the distorted one — they are answers to different questions, and the choice decides what a wide view can be.
The sky inside a cone
From under water the whole sky — every direction out to the horizon — arrives inside a cone of 48.61°. Outside it the surface is a mirror. That cone is a picture surface, and it has a distortion no surface in the curved field has — an area scale that runs to zero.
How wrong a measurement from one picture can be
The formula divides by a difference of two nearly equal numbers when the object is tall, which looked like the instability and is not. Measured, a taller object is recovered better and a more distant one worse — half a per cent per pixel at six metres and eleven per cent at a hundred and twenty. The argument that was wrong is as much the finding as the curve that replaced it.
The distance point is the viewing distance, drawn
There is exactly one place in the whole classical apparatus where the distance from the eye to the picture appears as a length on the page, and it is the offset from the centric point to the distance point. Everything this site exists to compute was drawn in the fifteenth century, on the horizon, and nobody said what it was.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
Vanishing pointPicture planeCross ratioFocal lengthResidualline at infinityMeasuring pointpoint at infinitysingle-view metrologyCamera tiltCentric pointConic