The Future Of Photography?

It's here now but just getting started. As I read more and more about this new kind of camera I realize that it's something that really works and will almost certainly get better and widely used in the next few years. The short version is that the Light Field camera captures every photon of light in the scene and makes focus a function of the development instead of the shooting. Because it just captures all the light available it has no focusing control on the camera and a simple "swipe" zoom control. It doesn't look like a camera but there's no reason it must.

I don't see how this will completely replace the photography of interchangeable lenses that we use so widely now but that may be because I don't know what the Lytro people have on their drawing boards. For now no professional will want to trade in all his or her lenses for this one zoom ratio. Choosing your focus point interactively after the fact of shooting makes the display of the image sound like more fun but seems to remove a creative option at the time of shooting. To repeat; that is something much more important to the professional trying to accomplish a designed look but the next step or two in this development may answer more questions than I can think to ask today.