For example, a portrait photographer often adjusts the lens of the camera so that the subject’s face is in focus, leaving what’s behind purposefully blurry. With that information, you can generate not just one but every possible image of whatever is within the camera’s field of view at that moment. Instead of merely recording the sum of all the light rays falling on each photosite, a light-field camera aims to measure the intensity and direction of every incoming ray. Light-field photography is far more ambitious. So the best a typical camera can provide is the familiar two-dimensional photograph, which has a fixed point of view and a focus determined entirely by how the lens was set when the photo was snapped. The sensor records the total intensity of the light rays landing on each point, or photosite, but in the process loses directional information about where the different rays came from. In a conventional digital camera, the light rays hitting each point on the image sensor combine. Nowadays, scientists and engineers prefer to think in terms of light rays rather than Leonardo’s more poetic “radiant pyramids.” But light-field photography is based precisely on his idea that the light arriving at any point-what he called the “smallest part” of the air-carries all the information necessary to reproduce any view that can be had from that position.ĭoesn’t an ordinary camera do that? Not at all. These pyramids intersect and interweave without interfering with each other.…The semblance of a body is carried by them as a whole into all parts of the air, and each smallest part receives into itself the image that has been caused.” In his manuscripts on painting, Leonardo wrote, “The air is full of an infinite number of radiant pyramids caused by the objects located in it. Perhaps most important, these cameras require a fundamental shift in the way people think about the creative act of taking a photo. ![]() ![]() The next generation of light-field optical wizardry promises ultra-accurate facial-recognition systems, personalized 3-D televisions, and cameras that provide views of the world that are indistinguishable from what you’d see out a window.īut light-field cameras also demand serious computing power, challenge existing assumptions about resolution and image quality, and are forcing manufacturers to rethink standards and usability. A single light-field snapshot can provide photos where focus, exposure, and even depth of field are adjustable after the picture is taken. Light-field technology heralds one of the biggest changes to imaging since 1826, when Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photograph of a scene from nature. A software update to the camera, coming soon, will even let you produce 3-D images. Lytro promises no more blurry subjects, and no shutter lag waiting for the camera’s lens to focus. Lytro, a Silicon Valley start‑up, has just launched the world’s first consumer light-field camera, which shoots pictures that can be focused long after they’re captured, either on the camera itself or online.
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