Dusting of my Lytro light field camera

I had previously posted a photo taken with a light field camera.

The original Lytro camera is available through Amazon and many other retailers. After about a year since its initial release, Lytro is releasing a new light field camera very soon (it's up for preorders already!), as such I'll write about light field cameras and images this time round. Much better specifications and hopefully meaning much better living pictures!

What's a light field camera?

Traditional cameras, from the early days of films to today's digital cameras, records the amount of light hitting the film or sensor, even our eyes relies on this same fundamental phenomena to see. This had enabled us to capture beautiful images for many years. However, light hitting a detector carries an additional information that's discarded (or rather, unable to record), this is the direction the light ray is coming from. The light field camera, through clever design of detector, enables us to compute the direction the light is comping from. This is what allows the image to be refocused after being taken. After all, what a lens does, when making things in focus, is aligning light rays from different directions to a single focused point.

A Morning Storm

A Feast!

What does it mean for a photographer?

Classical rules still apply, however, in order to fully exploit the camera and its abilities, the photographer would have much more to consider. There would have to be multiple 'layers' in the photo itself, either allowing for a slight perspective shift, or hiding then providing a revelation through the change of point of focus.

Head over to Lytro's website for a sampling of professionally taken light field images that fully exploits the functionality of the camera.

Complaints

I wish I have more control over the processing of the images. Auto white balance may fail in tricky scenarios, like in the water crown scene above, for example. The resultant color doesn't do the morning justice. Furthermore, there is no way to access the files on the camera outside of the Lytro software.

I find manual controls (shutter speed, presence of ND filter and ISO) over options very fiddly and cumbersome. Form factor, it's cute but with the small screen, fiddly zoom controls, and the shape of the camera, it can be rather weird to handle and frame pictures properly.

Lastly, its the low resolution on the final image. While novel, the original Lytro's resultant image after processing is only good for onscreen viewing as above. The new Lytro Illum seems to be able to do much better though. While I'd love to have the Lytro Illum, together with the myriad of photographic equipment that I already own, my logical part of my brain is telling me to hone my craft before jumping on to new gear.

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I posted nothing for almost a year, things had not been going smoothly and it seems life went out of balance in certain ways.
Learning to find time for my hobbies and to be less married to my work. To start things rolling again, this is a far longer than usual post :)