Light field photography

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http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/05/lytro-light-field-camera-hands-on-with-the-future-of-photograph/

Very cool. This camera captures not just the light from an image, but information about the light's vector field. That sounds really geeky, but what it means is that the camera knows where the light is coming from, so that with one "picture" you can refocus anywhere. Shoot first, focus later. Not sharpen, actually refocus. I'm not sure how useful it will be...I'm not quite as enthusiastic as the article's author. But it is cool.

 

[Dave]

I just heard about this on NPR last week and forgot to post about it. I was able to play with some examples and it's cool but not as good as I thought it would be. Essentially you can't focus everywhere, merely foreground and background. But it's always centered. For example, you can't focus on something in the top left corner. It reads it as either fore- or background and focuses accordingly.

Here's the story and examples on NPR.org.

 

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You can't recenter the photo sure, but you can refocus at any depth between the camera and the background. You can actually do that in the NPR example photos. I was able to focus, for example in the restaurant scene, on the camera, the guy at the far table, and the stuff on the table top halfway between, or even the chairs off to the side.

 

[Dave]

I was trying to do the clock on the first picture and could never get it to work right.

 

[Soliloquy]

Could they use this technology to create a photo that has everything in focus at once, like they did for that one movie that no one ever saw?

 

[Ravenpoe]

Could they use this technology to create a photo that has everything in focus at once, like they did for that one movie that no one ever saw?

Citizen Kane?

 

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Everything in focus all at once is pretty easy: get a cheap camera with a small aperture. This is neat because it lets you fix focusing errors or maintain a small depth of field yet focus (which you can't get with a cheap camera) on anything without having multiple photos.