LIGHT-FIELD TECH IS A GAME-CHANGER

How the Lytro No-Focus Light Field Camera Changes Photography

 

Building upon years of research by Stanford University, and with a PhD thesis and five further years of research in hand, Ren Ng has finally launched the infinite-focus, light field photography company Lytro. Fundamentally, a Lytro camera — a light field camera — does away with the single most important and limiting factor of conventional photography: the lens. Instead of focusing, distorting, and cajoling light onto a 2D digital or film plane, light field cameras capture everything that it sees. With conventional lenses, a specific focal point must be chosen — with Lytro, you simply capture every last grain of light data, and then use software to define a focal point.

This is quite a hard concept to get your head around, but it helps if you think of conventional photography as the equivalent of a flat, 2D bitmap or raster graphics, while light field photography is like 3D vector graphics. With conventional photography, what you see is what you get — you can’t resize your photos without losing data, and you certainly can’t alter the focal point. With light field photography, every single ray of light is recorded in a lossless fashion. You then create a virtual focusing point, and ray tracing is used to compute a digital bitmap image. Raw light field photographs will understandably be quite large — but not prohibitively so, according to Lytro.


With the technology out of the way, we should now focus on how light field photography will change the very fundamentals of photography. The basis of photography involves a hole — a lens — and some kind of 2D plane; a wall, a CMOS sensor, light-sensitive film, and so on. The quality of the image produced is entirely dependent on the lens that you use. With light field photography… there is no lens. Or rather, there is no lens in the conventional sense of the word. For over a hundred years we have struggled to focus the 3D world onto a 2D plane — and now, with one fell swoop, we can do away with heavy glass and entirely remove the concept of apertures. With light field photography, you point your camera at a scene and take a photo. No focusing, no thinking, just snap.

No more will candid low-light photography be limited to photographers with enough money to buy a $10,000 camera and lens — and no longer will you have to buy the perfect-bokeh 85mm lens for portraiture. Just point your camera at the subject, capture some light, and then play with the photo after the fact. Lytro will further democratize the digital photography field, allowing anyone and everyone to take perfect photos every time. The only difference between pros and amateurs will be the direction in which you point the camera — and the lengths you go to to find the perfect landscape, of course.

At the moment it sounds like the first Lytro product will be a consumer-grade point-and-shoot affair, which means you’ll probably have to use some kind of “focus browser” on your desktop or laptop to produce final images. Assuming light field technology can be scaled down to smartphones, though, it’s safe to assume that we’ll be able to pick a focal point using an app.
As for when the first Lytro camera will appear, we’re told that it could be on the market before the end of the year. There’s no data about how much it will cost — and don’t be surprised if the first light field camera costs a lot.

Read more about light field photography, and play with some Lytro photos

• By Sebastian Anthony