22Jun The Future of Digital photography?
Many people have said that HDR (High Dynamic Range) is the next big thing in photography. Even though HDR is fun to mess around with and gives you very interesting results. The HDR look is very stylized and i’m not 100% convinced that it will move from a niche market to a main stream feature, at least not until an HDR photo can be captured in a single shot.
What I do think will take the camera world by storm is the Light Field Camera by Lytro. I’m not and Optical engineer, so I can’t claim to know everything about lenses and sensors, but from the way I understand it, the Lytro technology basically captures the light’s intensity and distance of travel. It then saves this information with the picture data. This allows you to choose focal points after the fact.
The coolest thing about this is that you don’t have to worry about waiting for the camera to focus. Just press the button and sort out the image later. No word on pricing yet, but I’ve signed up for the pre-order list. Check out Lytro’s gallery to really get an idea of what this could mean for photographers. I hope the camera body doesn’t end up being hideous like the first generation of digital cameras.
June 22nd, 2011 at 9:31 pm
I agree with you 100%. This is very impressive stuff and when I saw the examples the other day it is quite something to see the picture change on the fly.
Just when you think things couldn’t get any cooler… 😉
June 23rd, 2011 at 3:01 am
The resolution of the pictures is totally unusable for real photography at the moment. Its like VGA-mobile cameras years ago. Thus, not the body size is the problem.
But it will be an very interesting for the future. Even if most of the consumers want pictures without postprocessing.
Another question is how good will be future sensor technology when not used for light field but for higher dynamic and signal/noise ratio. Most probably, we will see a technology like for holographic pictures that also provide 3D. Then, we get a real additional value to the resulting images and not “only” the process.
June 25th, 2011 at 11:32 am
The picture samples on the website have a whole lot of grain, this makes me think the shutter speed is set at a fixed setting and the exposure is just changed by ISO.
They most likely have the appature at something like f22 capturing a deep depth of field and then the software sharpens the point you click and blurs out the rest.
July 4th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Could be, I’m not really sure exactly how the whole project works. I haven’t had a chance to read the research paper.
October 21st, 2011 at 5:05 pm
This sounds really cool, but couldn’t they get some lens that has like f80 or something, and then blur it in photoshop?
Sounds like a good idea, but right now I don’t think that people will blow 400 bucks on it.
June 4th, 2012 at 10:42 pm
When will Lytro kill photography?