Light-field photography

http://bit-player.org/2012/light-field-photography

by wglb • 14 years ago

33 12 14 years ago

greatquux• 14 years ago

I was one of the first adopters of the Lytro and the article hits on all the good and bad points I've found in my own usage. (I built a hackintosh VM just to play with my photos). What I really wanted was a camera that would work in any lighting or at any speed without me having to manually adjust the settings. I'd thought light-field photography was something that could accomplish this, and perhaps it still is, but for now it's still out of reach.

lusr2• 14 years ago

How would that work? Part of what makes photography a creative art is choosing a creative, personal exposure from a range of visually valid possibilities for a given scene. Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck with it and I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that after the fact.

As a hobbyist photographer who enjoys shooting in low-light and is frequently disappointed by focusing errors, I totally see the value in the concept of the Lytro (my most recent disappointment being unable to correctly focus the smoke in this shot and having to post-process to bring it out more, but still not well enough: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lusr/6830872670/).

Too bad they don't ship internationally yet, although I feel the current lack of manual controls for shutter speed and ISO (and the presumably lower-end sensor) for this first revision would probably be disappointing if I did order it.

pavlov• 14 years ago

Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck with it and I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that after the fact.

Imagine a camera that constantly records video at a very high frame rate. You can then "go back in time" to pick a moment, and the creative decision of choosing the shutter speed can be done at that point. Technically it's just a matter of blending a range of frames around your chosen moment (a fast shutter uses just a few frames, whereas a slow shutter would combine dozens of frames to create your image).

arethuza• 14 years ago

Has anyone tried eye-tracking to decide where to re-focus? I found it slightly tedious to look at part of a picture and to have to click there...

tocomment• 14 years ago

That's a really great idea! You should write to the company. Maybe patent it?

defdac• 14 years ago

Your comment made me think of "Everything is Amazing & Noone is Happy": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

ithkuil• 14 years ago

Your comment made me think of "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)

While I completely agree with Luis C.K, I also like when somebody actually propose something cool to create.

stephencanon• 14 years ago

Not refocusing, but Canon made film cameras that selected the focus point based on eye-tracking. They were actually pretty damn cool. Actually, they still are pretty damn cool.

pehrlich• 14 years ago

I was thinking that on top of video for a pretty awesome experience

rsl7• 14 years ago

i imagine the best use is not interactive focus for the end user, but the creative possibilities of having all that source material. video with this could be amazing, one example being autofocus problems in poor lighting conditions.

drallison• 14 years ago

Take a look at Lytro CTO Kurt Akeley's talk for the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380) on the Lytro camera: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/spring-schedule-20112012....

Light-field photography

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