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.

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