Photography basics - a great technical walkthrough

What a nice train model, isn't it? Well, actually not, your brain has just been fooled, with the help of a bit of photoshop (well, maybe more than a bit) and some wise depth of field optical trick.
The original image is here. If by this line you don't care about the technical stuff behind, just stick to the neatness of this 'photoshopped' image and ignore the rest.

For all you photography enthusiasts out there, i found a great resource for learning about the basics of optics involved in the camera settings/parameters on Microsoft's channel 10 (which by the way, has lots of interesting stuff for geeks).

I've seen a few pages trying to take you through the principles of photography but none of them succeeded in offering detailed explanations for all the technical stuff like this one. And i hate physics, we should get this clear from the beginning, so I'm not a technical freak. But it's really useful to know the story behind all the camera settings to get a better understanding of what's actually going on with all the light and lenses. For me these articles filled some knowledge gaps i had for quite a while.

It tends to get a bit too technical, so it's not for everyone, but haven't you always wondered for example, what is the resolution of the human eye? Or what defines sharpness? Or, God forbid, whether you have become a bokeh whore (i'm not linking to this one, you should read and discover the meaning yourselves).