Thursday, October 20, 2011

Focus, Focus

If you are a photographic geek like me you are familiar with the annoying problems of deciding where to focus and how much depth of field to work for. Too narrow an aperture and sloppy focusing has ruined hundreds of my photos or if not ruined then winding up with an image that is less that its potential. No more worries if you have a few hundred bucks.
Interested? If so, check out this gallery of pictures taken with the Lytro light field camera. Light field pictures allow you to choose the focus point of the image after the fact since the camera and its software capture the entire light field and all of the information in it, unlike a conventional camera. This allows you to basically ignore aperture and focus when taking the shot and then focus after the fact...way cool. Stanford researchers introduced the "light field" concept about 15 years ago but it took dozens of cameras and a supercomputer to actually process the picture. No more, Lytro introduced a new camera yesterday. It’s $400 and appears to be no more complicated than a point and shoot. This is going to very, very hard to resist.

No comments: