If not already, you are now aware of Lytro—the light-field camera which has been tearing the arse out of Twitter over the last day. Pre-tell Wanker, what is a light-field camera? Quite frankly, if it is true, it is a milestone in photography. You see, the fundamentals haven’t changed since photography was invented—that goes for both still and motion photography.
Photography in my own words
The word is Greek and means drawing with light. There’s a light-sensitive plane enclosed in a lightproof box. This plane is either film or a digital sensor and its sensitivity to light can vary dramatically. At the front of the box, there’s an opening called the shutter that opens for a defined amount of time to allow light into the box to expose the light-sensitive plane. In front of that is the aperture, which controls the amount of light that passes the opened shutter. In front of that is the lens that determines which elements of an image are in and out of focus on the light-sensitive plane—it could be the background, it could be the foreground, it could be somewhere in the middle or it could be the whole image. This is how it has been for 170 years. Video is the same, but it is just repeated many times a second.
The resulting image, regardless of whether it’s digital or analogue, is a facsimile of that moment, defined by all of the aforementioned factors. It is static. Even when you consider the digital photography revolution has made photography even more accessible to the masses and changed the fortunes of the entire industry, the fundamentals of photography have not changed one bit.
Lytro—it's photography-two-point-oh
Lytro’s light-field camera changes some of these fundamentals. It doesn’t just capture a static moment; it captures multiple points throughout the focal range—light from different directions. The resulting file allows you to change the focus after the image has been taken. This, my dears, is fucking ground-breaking… if it is true!
The user is able to pick where in the image the focus should be—though in most of the examples given, there are generally only foreground, middle-ground and background focal points. You can find a better explanation here.
Photography in my own words
The word is Greek and means drawing with light. There’s a light-sensitive plane enclosed in a lightproof box. This plane is either film or a digital sensor and its sensitivity to light can vary dramatically. At the front of the box, there’s an opening called the shutter that opens for a defined amount of time to allow light into the box to expose the light-sensitive plane. In front of that is the aperture, which controls the amount of light that passes the opened shutter. In front of that is the lens that determines which elements of an image are in and out of focus on the light-sensitive plane—it could be the background, it could be the foreground, it could be somewhere in the middle or it could be the whole image. This is how it has been for 170 years. Video is the same, but it is just repeated many times a second.
The resulting image, regardless of whether it’s digital or analogue, is a facsimile of that moment, defined by all of the aforementioned factors. It is static. Even when you consider the digital photography revolution has made photography even more accessible to the masses and changed the fortunes of the entire industry, the fundamentals of photography have not changed one bit.
Lytro—it's photography-two-point-oh
Lytro’s light-field camera changes some of these fundamentals. It doesn’t just capture a static moment; it captures multiple points throughout the focal range—light from different directions. The resulting file allows you to change the focus after the image has been taken. This, my dears, is fucking ground-breaking… if it is true!
The user is able to pick where in the image the focus should be—though in most of the examples given, there are generally only foreground, middle-ground and background focal points. You can find a better explanation here.
Source: The Vine
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