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 :)

There are still a few beautiful places in Singapore

Took a short stroll at Lower Pierce Reservoir on Friday, a slight mist/haze (it's kinda hard to tell the difference these days..) covered the far bank of the reservoir, giving the sunset a little extra dash of magic :)

Was even lucky enough to catch sight of a white bellied sea-eagle circling over the reservoir! Albeit all I had was a blurry shot with my 18-55mm lens that was clearly unsuitable for the job. (Digitally zoomed and cropped as much as possible) 

Am I (Are we) spending too much energy on what's unimportant and missing out on what truly is? Do i really need my steady day job to be happy? That being said, how I wish I could afford this expensive big fat telephoto lens (and of course the skill) to capture the majestic eagle in it's full glory. After all I'm only human.

Back to Usual Work

And a really hectic few weeks had passed with me preparing materials, teaching and arranging for other speakers, in a class of secondary school student an introduction signal processing. It was also my first ever attempt in teaching a class of students (other than 2) with completely zero programming experience how to program in Python.

While exhausting, I had a great time with the students and I definitely think that I could do a far better job in teaching. Perhaps I will make available my teaching materials here after some tidying up.

Rewarded myself, and my dear, with a relaxing weekend together for walk in an old, to-be-torn-down estate in Toa Payoh, with one of the last few sand pit playgrounds and the assembly of my first RC airplane!

Mailboxes, a photo by moodoki on Flickr.

Dragon!, a photo by moodoki on Flickr.

My New Toy, a photo by moodoki on Flickr.

An Engineer's Rant

I had been furious this month, and accompanying it came some cynical laughter at certain failures. (I know I shouldn't laugh. I'm reflecting on it..)

Slow down, do more, walk further.

Doing too much in a rush today could just mean that you'll have to rush more in the future.

Quality should come from within, not as an external requirement. Knowing the quality evaluation process, we can always package crap in an air-tight container for the QA to prod, but when exposed to the real world, it would probably blow up in your face.

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Random rants I hope project managers will take seriously :s Or perhaps this is the wrong 'big picture'.

Code jamming

So the qualifiers of the 2013 Google codejam is over. And I managed to qualify! It's both a humbling and nostalgic experience for me.

I started to learn how to program as I was greatly drawn by computer games and thought I wanted to create one or two of my own, but soon realized that its much more than knowing how to code. I couldn't create nice art, and hardest of all, a novel idea for a game.. Not to mention my then only basic skills at programming in QBASIC.

What actually got me seriously coding was joining the National Olympiad in Informatics(NOI) when I was in secondary school, where I first learnt of numerous algorithms. Honed my skills in C/C++ and manage to get myself a bronze medal on my 2nd year of joining. It was great fun, but I didn't find any opportunity to join more after that.. Until I learnt of Google codejam :)

After more than 10 years of not doing competitive programming, I guess my skills had became rather rusty, despite the need to code as my daily job. I really do think competitive programming is a far more demanding tasks as compared to typical software/algorithm development in a day job.

I qualified, but not with great results. Time to prepare and sharpen my skills. Round 1A in 12 days!

TextMode

Text Mode Love

It's strange. Computing power is cheap, I love to work on photos, I work with 3D rendering and computer graphics and I do research on computer vision. Yet, the interface that I love to work on most is still the text based interface.

A few days ago, I crawled out of my cave and found that Google has a wonderful command line data tool called googlecl that allows you to access Blogger, Calendar, Docs, and many other Google services from the command line! I promptly downloaded it, only to discover (a pleasant surprise) that it's in the macports port list! (It's also in Ubuntu's apt repository). So everything is just an 'apt-get install googlecl' or a 'port install googlecl' away:)

Together with markdown, now I can make my posts from the command line as well
:)

And here's the first post from the command line, and perhaps future posts as
well :) But, I'll still have to figure out the best way to embed images from
flickr :s

Film Once More

Just had a roll of black and white film processed at a shop... Despite the advances in digital imaging technology, I still think that film still gave a different feel somehow. And there's fun in processing your own film as well! :)

So.. I went out and got myself some basic darkroom equipment and chemicals. Dark bag, developer, fixer and daylight developing tank just for starters... And time to relearn processing after a roll or so :D

A month or so with the EOS-M and things to say

So I bought the EOS-M.. despite numerous negative reviews out there, especially on the slow auto-focus speed. Is it really that bad? I had been using it for some time. Yes.. auto focus is slower than my DSLR with USM lenses, but its perfectly fine. (Sometime I feel that its faster than the autofocus on Nikon DSLRs)

Initially, I was disappointed, when I was testing the autofocus in my room. I wasn't really taking any pictures, just trying to get it to focus on random items. It was SLOW.. really slow. But I after taking it out for a real world test, it's not bad at all. And touch to focus helps a lot too, rather than focusing and re-framing method that we often employ. So it seems the 'slow autofocus' problem only seems to be bothering people who doesn't own the camera or had not use the camera to take any pictures.

Cons? I wish manual focus had some kind of help, maybe like the focus peaking feature found in some other cameras, also, it seems to a lot of turning to adjust a tiny bit of focus :/

A New Year

The world didn't end.. what a shame.. A new year had started with and a bunch of new things to try :)

1. Firmware hacking on my EOS 40D (see MagicLantern )
2. A Frankenstein camera of sorts (see FCam )? Most of the hardware are here now.. 
• why? reasons will come in a future post :)
3. A new camera, the EOS-M
4. Flash photography, I have 2 of them (external SpeedLights) now :)
5. Take more photos

And these will count as my New Year Resolutions

 

and less lazy i shall be..

i had been lazy.. or perhaps too ambitious, trying to do too many things at the same time, with many things ending in a mess.. now i'll clean up my work and put this blog back to live again :)