A few years ago, an idea called Non-Violent Communication (NVC) became important to how I communicate, especially in situations of conflict or potential conflict. When I’ve mentioned the NVC book to friends, I’ve found that many of them had already read it and use the ideas—one of my high school friends said “That book changed my life.”| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
In peer review for scientific and technical papers, peer reviews occasionally discuss the paper authors directly. In this post I argue that this behavior can be toxic: it harms the review process, the authors, and, potentially, the community as a whole. This particular problem can be prevented by one easy guideline, one already used in some communities: paper reviews should be about the paper, not the authors.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
There’s a myth that an artist begins with an intent or inspiration for a picture, and then just executes on that vision. I’ve written a lot about how this is generally false: art and science often involves discovering goals during a process of exploration. Moreover, the process of painting involves a continual series of choices. But I’ve found it hard to give detailed examples of these points from my own painting. During the process, it’s hard to make decisions, it harder to be aware ...| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
This post describes how I think about perspective when I’m drawing and painting. By perspective, I mean creating a sense of 3D space in a 2D picture. Classical theories treat perspective as a specific rigid principle that doesn’t accurately describe how artists or human vision actually work. Since the Modern Art era, a lot of art instruction (including my own) treats perspective as freeform, without any particular rules or principles. I think there’s more to say about it.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
In 2019, I started painting and drawing on my iPad frequently, especially during a month-long sabbatical in Europe, in which I often spent many hours just drawing. When I got home, I wrote a series of blog posts reflecting on those experiences. Those experiences—and the reflections from them in my blog—has driven my research since then.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
In this blog post, I outline a new theory for how shape perception works in pictures, specifically, how we interpret perspective. The ideas I present here can describe, at a high level, how it is that we have so many different ways to make realistic pictures, and that we can understand them. It combines ideas from human vision science, art history, and computational photography.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
Here are some responses to a few books I’ve read recently on intelligence and consciousness in animals, including humans.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
When do pictures look distorted, and what can we do about it? I’m not talking about “optical distortion”—flaws in lens optics—I’m talking about the perception of distortion. We seem to have a sense of when an object “looks right” or “wrong.” For example, here’s a photo I took with my smartphone:| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
Note: a version of these ideas now appear in a paper in Journal of Vision.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
Aaron Hertzmann’s blog| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
In this post I want to share a rule that I find useful in making art as a hobby: avoid the kinds of good/bad/should judgments that get in the way of making art.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
Have you ever noticed how peoples’ faces look stretched in group selfies?| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
A few years ago, while walking home, I noticed a dry cleaners across the street from my house. “Was that always there?” I thought, surprised. I’d walked by that spot many, many times over the years, but I’d never noticed the cleaners. A little Googling revealed that it’s been on my street for longer than I have. Yet, if you’d asked me for the nearest dry cleaners near my house, I would have answered that I didn’t know of any.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
In this post I propose a possible view of how to understand computer graphics research. Then I’ll mention some limitations of these definitions and philosophy of definitions in general.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
After reading the 50th Anniversary reminiscences about SIGGRAPH, and, attending some of the SIGGRAPH 2023 retrospectives, I thought I’d share what I often think about when I think about my early years at SIGGRAPH, and how one’s experience changes over time.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
At a few times in history, new technologies came along that changed the way we make art. Machines, chemicals, and/or algorithms replaced some of the steps that artists did, changing how we made art—and, sometimes, radically transforming what we thought think art is.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog
“You learn by doing,” they say; you can’t learn skills from theory alone. Experimentation is how we learn about the world, both individually and as a society.| Aaron Hertzmann’s blog