Light Field Camera

Wow, I just woke up and one thing popped up in my head:  Lytro!  There was this camera that evolved from a concept back in 2006 to an actual product in 2012.  It was a really cool concept at the time and it still is where it would capture rays of light so that you can form a picture with any plane of focus and depth of field of your choosing later.  It's a "living image".  That's a powerful concept.  You no longer have to worry about focusing.  You just need to worry about image composition.  Once the rays of light have been captured, you'd use your artistic acumen to create the final picture in software.

Today, I found out the company folded back in 2018.  That's unfortunate.  Thinking about it now, I'm wondering if the technology was ahead of its time, or if its primary raison d'etre simply was somewhat artificial.

The technology was definitely very cool but it was really expensive to store the rays.  An image captured with the first-generation Lytro would take up 16 MB of disk space.  Its software would generate an image only 1.17 megapixels big although you can generate any number of images at different focus lengths and angle of view of your liking.  The image would be good for a 6x4" print but no bigger than that.  The second generation of this camera could produce images of up to 4 MP so it should be good enough for a HD screen.  However, according to some user reviews on Amazon, it's just good enough to be displayed on a 4" screen.  I want to say the technology was ahead of its time but not really.

When I think of the art of photography, part of it is composition; part of it is lighting; part of it is the focus on a subject.  If you take away the focus issue, would it still be fun to take pictures?  For most people, I think it is.  For most people, the camera does all the focusing for you, right?  It finds a face, and focuses on that.  For some others, you'd prefer to set the focus plane on your own for the artistic effect you want to create.  So, if the premise of this camera is to remove the art of focusing from photography, would photography still be a fun hobby?  I don't know.  I like to have control of the field of depth and focus at the time when I take a picture, but sometimes, I also like to be able to have change that during post-processing, especially when you work with macro photography--you'd need a living image to do that.

The concept is very cool but practically speaking, I'd rather use a DSLR or my phone camera.