Light field camera will change the future of photography

This is good for pornography err I mean photography.
What ? Am I the only one here ?

So, no more blurry UFO pics and assuredly the NSA can find the coin in my lawn from their satellites.
....and yeah..porn

Edit:

We hope too much, its still blurry!
See this picture, see if you can make up the plate number.

As a professional photographer i was quite excited to see this post. I thought id have to get one of these as it would save me some time in focusing and post production.

But after looking at the examples and reading up on the specs of the camera i can see lots of problems with it , at least for a professional.

- Fixed f2 aperture. A fixed f2 aperture has a very shallow depth of field. This means only a small part of the picture will be in focus at any one time. Thats great if you are doing macro photography or taking a picture of a single object/person. But anything with a bit of depth will mean you will never get a fully focused picture. This would be terrible for taking pictures of more than one person.


- F2 lets in a LOT of light , and i mean a lot. Most of the photographs you take outdoors with an f2 lens will be over exposed (blown out white or yellow). This is why they have built in some ND filters but its still going to be hard work getting the right shot.

Usually on a normal DSLR camera you would increase the shutter speed to compensate for the amount of light let in by an f2 aperture but because this camera only has a max shutter speed of 1/250th of a second you wont be able to do that.

- Resolution 1024x1024 this is a tiny size photograph , round about 1mega pixel. it will be great for low-res selfies but not for anything you would want to show on an HD screen or have printed out. To put it in perspective the picture is 42x smaller than what you get on a Nokia Lumia 1020 mobile phone.

-ISO 3200 max. This camera will be pretty useless in very low light.

- No white balance control. Colors will seem wrong in different lighting conditions.

-1/250 max shutter speed. it will be hard to capture anything moving faster than a snails pace without motion blur.

So all in all its a great gimmick but with such terrible specs you are just paying a lot of money for a very limited range of picture styles. You would be better off buying an entry level DSLR that has a built in flash.

PhoenixOD
As a professional photographer i was quite excited to see this post. I thought id have to get one of these as it would save me some time in focusing and post production.

But after looking at the examples and reading up on the specs of the camera i can see lots of problems with it , at least for a professional.

- Fixed f2 aperture. A fixed f2 aperture has a very shallow depth of field. This means only a small part of the picture will be in focus at any one time. Thats great if you are doing macro photography or taking a picture of a single object/person. But anything with a bit of depth will mean you will never get a fully focused picture. This would be terrible for taking pictures of more than one person.

- F2 lets in a LOT of light , and i mean a lot. Most of the photographs you take with an f2 lens that are outdoors will be over exposed (blown out white or yellow). This is why they have built in some ND filters but its still going to be hard work getting the right shot.

- Resolution 1024x1024 this is a tiny size photograph , round about 1mega pixel. it will be great for low-res selfies but not for anything you would want to show on an HD screen or have printed out.

-ISO 3200 max. This camera will be pretty useless in very low light.

- No white balance control. Colors will seem wrong in different lighting conditions.

My wife, an experienced photographer, absolutely agrees with everything you just said!!!!!!!

And id like to point out it will be useless for UFO pictures because the resolution is so small that a dot in the sky will just be a dot in the photograph. There will be no way to enlarge it to see what it really it.

reply to post by 0bserver1


it produces adobe flash format?

if this isn't a hoax, the Chinese will soon come out with an identical product costing 10x less

reply to post by PhoenixOD


So there has to be allot of upgrading to do, before this product will benefit everybodies satisfaction.. But the concept I think is pretty neat . I think better ones will come in the near future

It wont change photography that much, even with the advent to digital photography, Ill ask this question.

At the big professional studios, were they shoot models for the covers of magazines, and posters and the like. What camera do you think they use?

A full frame Digital SLR? Maybe even a 35mm SLR...

No, typically they will be shooting medium format. Either a $40,000 a pop digital medium format, or a much cheaper 120 film medium format. Why? Well because good shots in photography is largely about luck, but outside of luck if you use the right equipment, you will get more good shots than bad. Medium format can have a 7cm wide frame, the frame size means that you get super high res, (talking 40-50Megapixels digital, 60-70Megapixel scans for film) the level of detail is just amazing. And the frame size makes the depth of field very very shallow, even more shallow than 35mm. So you can stop a medium format camera down to f/8 and still get a similar effect as at f/4 for 35mm.

For portrait shots, it is quite simply amazing.

Can people get great shots with iphones? yes, but the fact the lens and sensor is tiny does limit things, and too much post processing can hurt.

Source : 5 years real life photography experience, with digital, film and medium format (The Pentax 67 is amazing)


The technology is however very cool, and it will be pretty neat to see what people can come up with. A post process depth of field sounds a bit iffy to me, but i can see how it would be able to make some interesting shots.

PhoenixOD
- Fixed f2 aperture. A fixed f2 aperture has a very shallow depth of field. This means only a small part of the picture will be in focus at any one time.

zeroBelief

My wife, an experienced photographer, absolutely agrees with everything you just said!!!!!!!

I'm also an experienced photographer, so I understand what you're saying about depth of field, however I think you're making a mistake. You're applying what you know about a technology you know, to a technology you don't know and don't understand, and it's not applicable that way. In other words, you might be able to simulate f50 with the fixed f2 aperture (using the new technology), so why is the F2 aperture a limitation?

I'm not promoting the technology, as it indeed has limitations, but from my view it's the 11 megapixel spread over 3 dimensions instead of just two, so the pixel resolution after focusing won't be that great and won't be anything like a regular 11 megapixel camera. However it's probably good enough for some applications.

Kind of reminds me of an old documentary/interview that I saw several years ago (maybe 5-7yrs) where a guy was demonstrating only parts of a tech he had invented as most of it was classified. The jest was the Satellite or Aerial snapshots (might have been video too) would be taken at macro level to get a bigger picture. When required the video or pictures could be zoomed in at later time. Basically, if you did a crime and they new the about time frame and location you would have some explaining todo.

Don't remember hearing much after that one small interview. I will have to see if I can find again.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I do fully understand the technology involved in this camera

For a start its not an 11 megapixel camera its a 1 mpx camera 1024x1024.

The only way to simulate an aperture higher than f2 using a fixed f2 lens would be to produce a series of photographs over a range of focal lengths and then use something like Helicon to combine them into a single fully focused picture. this is a lot of work and very hit and miss. Its far easier to just use a normal camera at f16-f22 to do the job in a single snap.

There is no image stabilization on this camera either. So because there is a super low max shutter speed you would have to be very careful when taking photographs to keep it super still so you dont get any motion blur.

This is another way to waste money on gadget that is hardly useful to serious and experienced photographer.

Plenoptic cameras are out there for sometimes but they are still at experimental entry level so this one is early out to show the possibilities for perhaps (mobile phone snappies) to the crowd and that’s all.

Almost all photographers love to play with billions of possibilities delivered by playing with light and speed of their cameras and perhaps some photoshop touches to their work of art after.

Fixed something is hardly exciting!

PhoenixOD
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

this is a lot of work and very hit and miss. Its far easier to just use a normal camera at f16-f22 to do the job in a single snap.

There is no image stabilization on this camera either. So because there is a super low max shutter speed you would have to be very careful when taking photographs to keep it super still so you dont get any motion blur.

edit on 13-1-2014 by PhoenixOD because: (no reason given)

Id avoid anything smaller than about 11, since you loose sharpness due to diffraction. BUT it is a small effect and for the most part is fine and you are totally correct that down at the small apertures you get a good focus throughout.

It is in a way how those small disposable cameras work. Small aperture, fast film focus is more or less ok regardless of where you point it.

That is another point that is extremely relevant, I have the impression that these photographs are taken with the thing on a tripod on a very calm day. Even when a camera can take many frames a second slight movements are a problem, now with a 1MPixel sensor, i imagine you can make that thing as fast as hell. Even so, it will take many shots throughout the focal, each one of those you need to be calm and ok otherwise the image will be bad.

Its very neat technology, but in terms of professional photography... the game hasn't been changed for about 50 years.

Imagine you take multiple random pictures and never worry about blurry unsharp pictures anymore

Maybe we could all pitch in and buy a few of these cameras for NASA....anything has to be better than the potatoes with holes drilled in them that pass for cameras on spacecraft.

PhoenixOD
I do fully understand the technology involved in this camera

You do?

For a start its not an 11 megapixel camera its a 1 mpx camera 1024x1024.

That's the output. But since you understand the technology fully, please explain why there's only 1 megapixel of output from the 11 million light rays captured.

The only way to simulate an aperture higher than f2 using a fixed f2 lens would be to produce a series of photographs over a range of focal lengths and then use something like Helicon to combine them into a single fully focused picture. this is a lot of work and very hit and miss. Its far easier to just use a normal camera at f16-f22 to do the job in a single snap.

And is there a clue as to why there are 10 million more light rays captured than pixels of output in there somewhere? It's not exactly like 11 one megapixel images, but I think you are getting closer to the truth here, than in your original comment about depth of field.

There is an "all in focus" processing option, as noted here:

support.lytro.com...

2D formats [export resolution - 1080x1080]

Refocused Image (.jpg) - Choose a focus point and export, will create a .jpg image with your selected focus point
All-in-Focus Image (.jpg) - Perspective shift processing required. Will create an All-in-Focus .jpg image. Note "All-in-Focus" range will be the same as in the lightfield image; out-of-focus targets in the original due to range or movement will still be out of focus.

So you can either shift the focus, or you can make everything within the light field in focus, thus enabling you to get depth of field results like much smaller apertures than the f/2 aperture used. I think that's part of the reason there are so many more light rays than pixels of output.

potato camera would take sharper images than this.

any grasp of photography and optics would tell you it isn't just about slapping a big DSLR on the font. Photography pointing down and photography pointing up are two completely different challenges. Why? Well looking down you have oodles of light, looking out you have... not all that much.

[edit for general additions after reading the above]
11million rays of light? thats fairly low light

Pentax should start making the old 6x7 again... now THAT is a camera

ErosA433
Its very neat technology, but in terms of professional photography... the game hasn't been changed for about 50 years.

Yes and I don't think this technology will change professional photography. Polaroid didn't change professional photography either, but it was an alternative some people used for certain reasons. It remains to be seen if this technology will find a niche, but the review I read isn't very promising:

www.dpreview.com...

The Lytro LFC is so unlike any conventional camera that it doesn't make sense to score it in comparison to them. Ultimately, though, we're not convinced that the Lytro either solves any existing problem or presents any compelling raison d'etre of its own. If it were higher resolution or allowed greater separation or could produce single lens 3D video it might generate a lot more excitement. As it is, it feels like a product arriving before the underlying technology is really ready.

All of which is a great shame, because Lytro has done a great job of making a credible consumer product out of a piece of fairly abstract scientific research. It's quite possible that in the hands of the right people it will result in some interesting creations but we just don't yet see it as a mass-market device.

They do leave the door open for the release of higher resolution versions of the technology which might be a lot more interesting.

Silcone Synapse
reply to post by nugget1

 

They are a bargain-$499
Cheaper than a decent DSLR...
store.lytro.com...


Could be worth waiting for the next gen to get any bugs worked out.
But great for post processing images.

Would still prefer a DSLR to one of these low res cameras !

reply to post by 0bserver1


This story would be fine in 2012

reply to post by Arbitrageur


The stats of the camera as stated on the site is an output resolution of 1024x1024 pixels. Regardless of how many light rays they say it takes to produce that final picture the output resolution is 1024x1024 which is roughly 1 megapixel as 1152 x804 is 1 megapixel.

Source

From the 'cons' section of your link

Very low processed resolution
Explorable output tends to require contrived compositions
Small, low-res screen
Focus slow in Creative mode
Cross-hatch banding visible in high ISO images
No control over white balance can leave unpleasant tint under artificial light

Sadly, we're not fully convinced by the Lytro, conceptually interesting though it is. The limitations of the current LFC, both in terms of final resolution and the limited range of scenes its can bring something interesting to, mean we'd struggle to recommend it.

As a 'don't worry about focus' point-and-shoot, the Lytro isn't terribly successful - sharpness of close subjects isn't great in Everyday mode and the camera can't focus its lens fast enough to make Creative mode a credible alternative. Either way, the final resolution of 1080 x 1080 is simply too low to make it useful for much more than Facebook. The lack of control over any shooting functions, including white balance can also spoil the results.

Also the only output format is JPG which is a lossy compressed image format which is low quality compared to bmp, png, tiff or native RAW.

The lack of a real optical view finder means you will never get the picture looking the same as you see on the low res viewing screen.

Having a 'all focus mode' is better than just having the f2 depth of field but with a normal DSLR you can fully control the depth of field (depending on the lens) from f2-f22. So far their system is an all or narrow depth of field.