
 Light-field photography - wglb
http://bit-player.org/2012/light-field-photography
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greatquux
I was one of the first adopters of the Lytro and the article hits on all the
good and bad points I've found in my own usage. (I built a hackintosh VM just
to play with my photos). What I really wanted was a camera that would work in
any lighting or at any speed without me having to manually adjust the
settings. I'd thought light-field photography was something that could
accomplish this, and perhaps it still is, but for now it's still out of reach.

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lusr
How would that work? Part of what makes photography a creative art is choosing
a creative, personal exposure from a range of visually valid possibilities for
a given scene. Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck
with it and I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that
after the fact.

As a hobbyist photographer who enjoys shooting in low-light and is frequently
disappointed by focusing errors, I totally see the value in the concept of the
Lytro (my most recent disappointment being unable to correctly focus the smoke
in this shot and having to post-process to bring it out more, but still not
well enough: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/lusr/6830872670/>).

Too bad they don't ship internationally yet, although I feel the current lack
of manual controls for shutter speed and ISO (and the presumably lower-end
sensor) for this first revision would probably be disappointing if I did order
it.

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pavlov
_Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck with it and
I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that after the fact._

Imagine a camera that constantly records video at a very high frame rate. You
can then "go back in time" to pick a moment, and the creative decision of
choosing the shutter speed can be done at that point. Technically it's just a
matter of blending a range of frames around your chosen moment (a fast shutter
uses just a few frames, whereas a slow shutter would combine dozens of frames
to create your image).

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lusr
Fair point - I was a bit too rigid in my statement. High-end DSLRs already
support shutter bracketing of this sort. From a technical perspective, my mid-
range Nikon D7000 can take 16.2 megapixel images at a rate of 6 frames per
second, which may or may not be adequate for what you're proposing.

Of course at that point the camera's image buffer fills up and the speed of
your storage and the compression engine becomes the bigger technical
challenge.

Whether you can take decent resolution photos on a device priced at consumer-
level at a reasonable rate (without much of a delay between shots) becomes an
interesting question and perhaps an interesting camera feature. If I had a
Canon I would use CHDK to experiment with this.

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drallison
Take a look at Lytro CTO Kurt Akeley's talk for the Stanford EE Computer
Systems Colloquium (EE380) on the Lytro camera:
[http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/spring-
schedule-20112012...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/spring-
schedule-20112012.html).

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arethuza
Has anyone tried eye-tracking to decide where to re-focus? I found it
_slightly_ tedious to look at part of a picture and to have to click there...

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defdac
Your comment made me think of "Everything is Amazing & Noone is Happy":
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

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ithkuil
Your comment made me think of "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)

While I completely agree with Luis C.K, I also like when somebody actually
propose something cool to create.

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rsl7
i imagine the best use is not interactive focus for the end user, but the
creative possibilities of having all that source material. video with this
could be amazing, one example being autofocus problems in poor lighting
conditions.

