The primary thing you should know is that I am not a mathematician, and I am not an optical physicist. I am not even a professional in any photographic field. I am, by day, a software engineer, and by night a computer geek who happens to like photography. In my quest to learn more about my hobby, I began learning about optical formulæ I quickly found that it was a pain to crunch all those equations. Since I have the modest skills required to automate these calculations, I decided to do so.

But this was not after I searched long and hard for something out there that already did this sort of thing. Along that journey, I found many good equations, and a few interesting ideas, but nothing that I really wanted to use a lot. (One exception is an online depth of field graphing program. However, I hope one day to match or outdo that applet by adding a graphing module to ƒ/Calc..)

The end result was that I created this program out of whole cloth, except that I did not derive a single equation that I use. Every equation, constant and identity I use in this program comes from postings on Usenet, pages on the Internet, email list archives and standard reference sources. As such, I cannot claim that I have a totally firm grasp on what exactly these equations do. I have a basic idea, and that helped with debugging, but in the end, if there are errors in my math, it’s probably my fault due to overly clever [mis]use of these formulæ, rather than my source’s fault. So, please contact me through the ƒ/Calc web site if you find something broken with this program. If you don’t find any errors, forward your kudos to the great Internet, that wonderful resource that we all depend on these days. The free web version is my gift back to the Internet for an educational few months.

Thanks, y’all.