Orthocentre — where it appears
Named by 7 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
Recovering the camera from the picture it drew
Draw a box from a known camera, forget the camera, and get it back from the twelve drawn edges alone. Agreement to one part in 10¹⁵ is a statement about the geometry, because the only thing that crossed between the two halves was a list of line segments.
The third point put where it looks right
Three-point perspective is taught as two vanishing points plus a third placed by judgement. The third is not free: two points and the centre of the picture fix it exactly. It survives being placed by eye because in the layout a book draws it belongs thousands of pixels off the paper, where 400 px of error costs less than a degree — and in a photograph taken looking up at a tower the same 400 px costs ten.
One conic calibrates the camera
A focal length is usually recovered from two perpendicular vanishing points by an orthocentre construction with a square root in it. There is a second derivation with no construction and no square root — two vanishing points of perpendicular directions must be conjugate with respect to one conic in the picture — and the two agree to the last bit. They are not two methods. The conic is what a calibrated camera is.
The line every nosing is on
Nothing in a staircase points up the pitch. Every surface in it is level or vertical, and its picture has a vanishing point off the horizon all the same — belonging to the line the front edges of the treads lie on. That point is not free: it is collinear with the travel point and the vertical point, and the angle it makes says the rise-to-run the builder chose.
Three-point, laid out with a straightedge
Recovering a camera from a drawing is the familiar direction. The other direction — stand somewhere, measure a room, and lay the picture out — had never been taken in three-point, because the third axis needs a measuring point on a line nobody draws. With it, every corner lands where the camera puts it to three parts in ten million million of a pixel, and nothing anywhere is judged.
A drawing has three horizons
The triangle three vanishing points form is not a scaffold. Each of its sides is the vanishing line of one of the three coordinate planes — the floor's horizon and two walls' — and its orthocentre is the centre of the picture. So the horizon a perspective drawing is built on is one side of a triangle, and it is special only because the ground is where things stand.
The triangle a camera cannot move
Three mutually perpendicular directions give three vanishing points, and that triangle is self-polar with respect to the image of the absolute conic — to 3.1e-13 px, with no length and no angle anywhere in the statement. Turn one direction two degrees out of square and the polars miss their sides by 65.8 px. The statistic this collection has been printing as evidence for the same claim, meanwhile, is an identity that cannot fail.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
Vanishing pointPrincipal pointFocal lengthCamera calibrationDemonstrationHorizonAbsolute conicCamera tiltConicFocal recoveryIncidenceMeasuring point