Just recently, a friend sent me an e-mail that read "Light Field Camera". My first thought, "what?". What is a light field camera? Is that a field camera that is lightweight? I clicked on the link provided and start reading the article and all the ugly comments people started posting about the new camera. I suppose this is where people get annoyed when something new is about to displace the old.
So, apparently, someone just invented a new way of recording light by capturing the direction that light rays pass into the camera. What you say? In theory, if we can capture all the light rays (i.e. directions of light) passing through the lenses, we could recreate a scene at different focus points. This is cool because no longer would one have to focus correctly. Just shoot and refocus in post-processing. It does take away the art of photography but I can see many benefits of this new technology including 3D imaging--some argued that you need two eyes to create a 3D image but forgot that there are an infinite number of focal planes in this new image capturing technology. By sampling the image on different focus planes, it should be possible to create a 3D model. Neat.
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What are these bugs? I've never seen them before. I saw them at my parents' place the other day. Lots of them in soil or grassy areas.
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It's a very interesting concept, but the limitation of the technology is that you will need the "light field" engine to be distribute with the images - otherwise it's just a snapshot. Conceptional, "light field" photography captures the "moment" and allows one to re-examine that moment later. Not sure if I see a viable commercial use beyond the obvious surveillance (so you can re-focus on points of interest in the image postmortem) and/or espionage (little time, so snap now and analyze later) uses. In my mind, photography is an art form - an expression of the environment as viewed through the eyes of the photographer.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was surveillance applications too. One concern I have is how sharp pictures can be. I'm not a pixel peeper but I like it that pictures are tack sharp where they need to be and I have not seen a tack sharp picture yet from the samples they provide.
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