Focus problem? As the neighborhood photographic purist, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with photography as it stands today.

Curious though, I wonder how well it works in low light conditions. I would imagine, from an experimental photo standpoint, you could devise some pretty funky stuff if you wiggled the camera during a long exposure.

Very interesting and innovative but … what’s the point? It doest’t take much time and effort to change the focus point from the spear to that guy or vice versa and shoot another picture.

The point is when you spend that time.

For example, is it one time only, when you haven’t got the rest of your work-in-progress in front of you, in the middle of a field of biting flies, or is it in your artsy soho loft, surrounded by the other photos that will also be part of the finished work? I’m sure you can think of other examples of when being important.

It’s called creativity and it’s good for you, especially if you’re passionate about photography.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it! Enhancing the available options inherently allows greater personal expression!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ7s6xWP3e0

Digital photography is just getting warmed up, folks.

http://business2press.com/2010/09/24/adobe-demos-photography-with-infinite-depth-of-field/

…and have been working on this also for many years:

http://comments.deasil.com/2008/02/25/adobes-crazy-depth-of-field-lens/

Anyone else having this glitch?

This is an early days proof of concept as I see it. It’s not a launch party. I’d rather read about these advancements now than in three years time.

Besides, this is likely going to need a few other things in place beforehand to make it commercially viable. Off the top of my head, support in Photoshop for an infinite focus image. Perhaps extra hardware to cope with the processing. Best get these balls rolling now while there’s time.

Cue photographic purists complaining in 3, 2, 1…..

Photographic film purists are the best. They get uptight about photoshop when airbrushing, compositing multiple images, dodging and other manipulations have been around for ages.

Wait till light field cameras do cinema quality video. That will make the job of focus puller obsolete and cut down on retakes.

(from 2008)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9876296-39.html#ixzz1PzJpP6nS

So if you’re using a 10×10 area for each microlens, the resulting image is 100th the resolution of what a normal camera image would be.

This doesn’t seem like a horrible tradeoff. I think we’ve reached the apex of useful pixel density on consumer cameras, so instead of a 40 megapixel image, why not a 1.5 MP image with 5×5 lensing for your facebook or webpage pics? Especially given the advantages in light gathering, post-focus, and 3D information.

It also seems like some clever person could figure out how to still extract the data from overlapping microlenses.

-a non standard format

Not to point out the obvious, but most home users that are putting pictures on FB are not going to take the time to select their photo settings and export them to jpg to upload them to FB. For heaven sake the most used “camera” on Flickr is the ifone. And that camera is piss poor compared to a good Canon point-in-shoot that is 5 years old.

Put this technology into something the size of an SLR, make it at least 10 MP “affective” (at least something comparable to the current generation of midrange DLSR). I can professionals using this way more than a casual home user.

Or for some serious bonus points figure out how to get Adobe to buy into your technology, put it in everything they sell, make it a web standard and voila everyone would use it. (Assuming the file size isn’t horrendous.)

There are however, many points outside of the realm of photography.

An example from something I read yesterday explains a current dilema of security cameras. A camera will follow a person moving in a the frame, adjusting the focus as it needs to. If there’s two people in the frame, at different depths, its not possible to follow both. With this sort of setup its possible to have 50 people at different depths all in focus.

There’s also the advantage of being able to take shots with a long focal depth, without needing to have a long shutter speed.

Apparently, these things also work very well in low light conditions, but judging by the fact that virtually all the shots on their page seem to be full of bright nice light I’m a bit skeptical about that one at the moment.

I assume that the selling point would be the (today either impossible, impractical, or requiring seriously zooty lenses) sorts of instantaneous “bracketing” that would allow you to get well focused images of fast moving scenes, where a re-shot isn’t an option, or do assorted arty depth of field stuff without a backpack full of glass. You would then do the usual raw -> distribution format processing step, only with the additional focus tweaking abilities.

A random lens will need initial calibration, but a lens with only some amount
of randomness could actually be calibrated iteratively and become better over time.
Scratches, dirt etc can also be adapted to compensated for to some degree.

A light field imaging camera doesn’t even necessarily need the bulky thing we
usually call a lens. The lens could be spread out and integrated into the camera body.

The limiting factor is probably processing power and storage needed – at least
for mobile devices.