Monday, March 5, 2012

Shoot Now, Focus Later: A Little Camera To Change The Game

Shoot Now, Focus Later: A Little Camera To Change The Game

Just when you thought you had the latest in camera technology, along comes something new and shiny and ... rectangular.


Claire O'Neill/NPR

The Lytro we received to demo is about four inches long. It's called the Lytro, and it uses something called "light field technology." In short: You shoot now and focus later.

NPR's resident photo expert, Keith Jenkins, explains: In a nutshell, he says, this camera captures not only the color and the intensity of light — which is what normal cameras do — but also the direction of that light — from every possible angle. Still confused? We are, too.
The best analogy came from Lytro CEO Ren Ng, who made a musical analogy. Let's say you like a band, and they're great live. But say you want to record them. You generally don't just stick a mic in the middle of the room and hope for the best. You record each band member — and sometimes even their instruments — separately in a studio. That way, when you're mixing it all together, you can control every element.
So think of the live band as a point-and-shoot camera on automatic and the studio recording as the Lytro.

read the rest -- and try it out, refocus their examples after the fact...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/03/01/147665130/shoot-now-focus-later-a-little-camera-to-change-the-game?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20120304

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