Lytro Light Field Camera: A Photography Revolution

July 6, 2011

I spotted this last week and thought it was simply AWESOME.

How many times have you fiddled with camera focus (or waited for the automatic focus to get it right) before taking a picture?

This new technology, from Lytro, promises to change the way we take photographs. The person (Ren Ng) who invented this did so as their PhD Thesis at Stanford, and is just now developing a product. Sweet.

How Does it Work? Very quickly (because the technology would take a long time to understand, and, yeah, I could understand it since I know a bit about Fourier Optics from my own Thesis, but, I digress): The picture is taken. That picture has ALL the information needed to allow you to pick a focus point AFTER the picture has been taken. You simply click your mouse where you want the focus point to be, and the algorithm takes care of the rest.

To show you how this works, I have grabbed a few photos from the Lytro web site with different focus points. Figure 1, above, shows the close focus. I clicked my mouse on the young woman on the right (her nose to be exact). The picture automatically put her face in focus while the others behind her are more and more blurry the further they are from the focus point.

In Figure 2, I clicked my mouse on the second woman’s nose…you can see how young woman #1 becomes less focused and woman #2 is now clear.

For the last picture, Figure 3, I focused on the woman’s nose in the back and clicked my mouse. See how the women up front are now blurry while the women in the back are in focus.

Remember: I did all this with one photo, the Lytro algorithm (and the information gathered via the Lytro camera) did all the rest. VERY AWESOME! Go to the Lytro web site picture gallery and try a few pictures your self.