I just received my Lytro lightfield camera. It’s the first commercialized plenoptic camera, which is an optical device with an array of lenses to capture a scene at multiple focal points.
There’s a lot of terrible rhetoric in the tech and electronics communities about this camera, claiming that it will allow you to take a photograph and “worry about focusing it later.” It’s just the sort of idiotic thing the technofetishists always believe, that new media do the same thing as old ones but better.
In truth, the Lytro is not a device that allows the refocusing of traditional pictures. In fact, there is no such thing as a “traditional picture” for Lytro, since the software to extract the images composits them into a Flash-based viewer that disallows single frame export. (In fact, you cannot even export your images from the software, but only upload them to Lytro.com and embed them with a promotional logo. That’s a terrible mistake that I hope the company will fix soon enough.)
Here’s the first image out of my Lytro camera. It’s not any good, but it will give you a sense of how it works. As a photographer, what interests me most about the Lytro is learning the aesthetics of a new form, the plenoptic image, not making my life as a still photographer “eaiser.” That’s going to take some time.
Comments
Al Matthews
Thanks for posting. I imagine there will be a bit of loosening of the format as Lytro contemplates how near they sit to a community of researchers, no? Flash viewer as a quickie choice, perhaps.
Nick LaLone
I have been excited to see people not affiliated with the organization use this product. The limitations of the webuse only bit are really unfortunate. Print Screen is such a useful tool even after all these years. It is a shame that printing a full screen photo will probably end up in a lot of quality loss.
Thank you for offering up correct info and limitations!
robert jackson
Thanks for this Ian. It’s good to give people the info especially when the price is high for what is at present an exciting but relatively interesting gimmick.
It all depends on whether the technology is functional enough for people to find an interest in using it. Seeing as Lytro have encapsulated the hell out of the whole experience, Iâ??m guessing that any ability to tinker with its formal operational aesthetics only goes so far as what works for Lytro.
Mark N.
On the artistic angle, I wonder what kind of existing work this might tie into best?
As far as I can tell, although this tech opens up a number of new settings it can be used in, traditional film cameras could do something like this if the scene is static, by treating multiple photographs as samples from the plenoptic function (it seems like this camera does something similar actually, but it takes the photos simultaneously by having multiple lenses in the same device). Some brief Google Books trawling turns up a 2008 PhD thesis, “Parallax photography: Creating three-dimensional motions from stills” (Ke Colin Zheng, U. Washington), which is mostly about a different kind of compositing (for parallax effects), but has some interesting sections about how photographs with interactive “spatial selection” can be a new kind of photographic form enabled if we treat a plenoptic function as the photographic output (in the case of this thesis, mathematically reconstructed from a number of images treated as planar samples from the function).
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there was something crazy from the 1970s or earlier experimenting with something like that, but I haven’t been able to find anything.
Carl
They should make an iPad/iPhone app that uses the device camera to track your eye motions then focus the scene wherever you look. That would make the photo seem eerily realistic.
Paul Caplan
Just a note, the player works fine on the iPad. Works nicely with a touch interface.