Investigates the use of shape from-shading for view synthesis. The aim of our study is to determine whether needle-maps delivered by a new shape-from-shading (SFS) algorithm can be used as a compact object representation. Specifically, we aim to show that the needle maps can be used to generate novel object views. To this end we conduct two sets of experiments. Firstly, we use the recovered needle maps to re-illuminate objects under varying lighting directions. Here we show that a single input image can be used to construct faithful re-illuminations under radical illumination changes. Secondly, we investigate how the needle map can be used to generate new object poses. Here we show that needle-maps can be used for both view interpolation and view extrapolation.