Happy Friday Friends!
Today I wanted to share with you a truly new technology in photography—the Lytro Light Field Camera, a camera that turns light into living pictures. When I first read about this technology, I thought it seemed impossible (but still totally amazing). But, at the end of this year, Lytro will debut the first light field camera designed and manufactured for the regular consumer. Before reading about the Lytro camera, I’d never heard about light field photography (or light field science for that matter), so let me break it down for you.
The light field is a core concept in imaging science. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras record a scene in two dimensions and only capture a small fraction of all the light available. Light field cameras capture the color, intensity and vector direction of all of the light traveling through a scene, which means the sensor records the entire scene in three dimensions. It records a “living” scene, almost like you are standing right there in it again. All of this information is then processed by a powerful software that uses crazy algorithms to allow the photographer to make use of the full light field, to take advantage of all of the information captured.
So what does this actually mean for the photographer? It means that many aspects of light field pictures can be manipulated after the fact. The data captured allows both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they’re snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views. With these amazing capabilities, pictures become immersive, interactive visual stories that were never possible before – they become living pictures.
What’s more, Lytro’s consumer camera condenses what was once a room full of cameras and computers in a university lab into a small, portable package—completely revolutionizing digital photography as we know it.
I could continue espousing the revolutionary capabilities of this camera, but it is much better for you to them see for yourself. Click on different points in the images below and you’ll see first hand what the Lytro Camera can do.
If you are interested in learning more about the camera or reserving one of your own you can visit the website of the Lytro project. I cannot wait to test one of these out!
And, the camera is a totally cutie! Super compact, colorful, and less expensive that I would have thought. The 8 GB version is $399 and the 16GB version is $499. Not a bad price for a camera. And seriously, look how cute it is!
