Using photography as a metaphor for teaching image synthesis

The camera has long served as a metaphor for teaching three-dimensional graphics in introductory computer graphics courses. We extend this metaphor to include the complete photographic pipeline as a framework for teaching image synthesis in a second graphics course. We present the correspondence between photographic processes and areas of study in image synthesis, and discuss the success of using this framework in an image synthesis course at our university for the past 3 years.