[Commentary] One of the most important imaging innovations in a decade is now coming to market: the “living pictures” captured by the Lytro camera.

A standard sensor captures parallel light beams entering a camera, and turns the output from the electrically excited pixels’ into a 2D image.

Lytro’s unique new device adds an optical overlay atop the sensor to instead capture the “light field,” all the rays coming at the camera from multiple angles. The result is a photo in which you can alter the focal plane at any time after capture.

This technique has been bandied about for many years — it was in fact demonstrated in 2007 at our own 6Sight conference by Adobe, with a large multi-lens camera attachment, and the founder of Lytro, Ren Ng, who had developed a filter that sat on the sensor, inside the camera.

At Lytro, Ng has succeeded in bringing what was once expensive and delicate hardware to the mass-produced consumer market, with a small hand-held camera priced at just $399.

This month, the reviews have been coming in, and photography enthusiasts and gadget lovers alike have been raving about the device’s powerful new capability. [Popular Photography’s review is here.]

Many have criticized the camera for its low-resolution image — about a megapixel. That’s not a justified critique in our opinion, as the “living pictures” have to be seen on a screen — no photographic print, whether on paper or any other material, can deliver the capability to change focus — and on screen, a megapixel is enough. However, they have also slighted the camera for its LCD: in these days where most cameras have 3-inch screens, a device whose output depends upon screen-based viewing should clearly have a screen much larger than 1.5 inches.

Moving pictures, and moving within pictures

What’s important here is not that the light true is a “focus free” camera, as it is often billed, but instead, that it yields a captured image that delivers a primary attribute of human vision: rack focus. When we look at something close by, everything in the distance is fuzzy and blurry; when we look at something far away, that which is a few feet distant goes out of focus.

We have all gotten so used to the two extremes of photography — either the deep-depth-of-field photograph in which everything is in focus, or the shallow-depth-of-field image in which one nearby object or person is clear, but surrounded by bokeh-beautiful blurring — that we have all but forgotten that both types of focus also represent a locked focus that is completely unnatural.

The Lytro image brings to photography, for the first time, a much more natural representation of the way we normally see things: with focal points that change as we shift our attention.

So yes, the Lytro image is very cool, and something you have to see to really understand and appreciate — but once you do see it just a few dozen times, the thrill wears off… So you can click to focus on the flower in the foreground and make the trees in the background blurry, then click to bring the trees into sharp focus and have the flower fall into a nice bokeh blur. So?… How often are you going to continually want to do that?

Not to sound too cynical here — especially as I have not even used the actual camera, but instead have only looked at pictures online — I actually got bored with this “groundbreaking exciting new technology” pretty quickly. Once you grasp the concept, you are likely to find that you really don’t want to keep clicking on a picture to choose your own point of focus. Really, we want the photographer to do that for us, to select the most important element in a scene — and when we are the photographer, we enjoy that level of control ourselves… Control which otherwise might be called “artistic expression.”

And therein lies the dilemma: on the one hand, the Lytro technology brings to photography an essential element of human vision that it has always lacked — it arguably makes photography much more natural, and one might be hard-pressed to argue that in the near future all cameras should not provide such functionality. On the other, eliminating focus from the moment of capture also eliminates essential elements of photography: control, selection, and artistic intent. A photograph captures  more than just a moment; it is also careful framing and composition, and considered choice of focus and exposure — it directs our attention to one essential thing that the photographer believes is worthy of that attention. It does not in general claim to convey an entire scene, an entire environment, with all of its elements equally represented. If that were the goal of photography, than its ultimate expression would be a live video feed from a 360° surveillance camera. Despite the popularity of webcams showing just that type of live feed from an environment — it ain’t photography, is it?

Other imaging capabilities

Fortunately the Lytro technology is not just a one-trick pony. The company promises that while the first model captures low resolution images at standard brightness, future models will improve drastically on both aspects ­— and the instant light field capture can mean instant autofocus as well.

Not only that, the new image capture technique can also yield distance data: meaning the photo’s point of view can be slightly pivoted post-capture, and even a 3D photo can be discerned from a single exposure. Many pundits predict these features will even be delivered to the current cameras with a firmware update.

That is something we look forward to more than the basic rack focus feature. Is also a capability that might come to market from other technologies, such as combining two basic image sensors in a camera, as is available now in a handful of 3D cams, or by using time-of-flight and other distance sensors to capture location information about every object in the scene at the same time the image sensor captures the basics of what we consider a “photograph.”

These technologies are already used in Microsoft’s Kinect controller for its Xbox video game console — and enthusiasts have used the Kinect to capture rooms in 3D.

In the near future, we might simply take one or two “exposures,” that will yield an image file that truly does completely capture the environment we were looking at — a file within which we can “re-see” that place from any angle or distance as we choose, at any later time.

With such a capability to capture not just a moment but the environment, we indeed might have to redefine photography — and perhaps Lytro and its light-field imaging is the first step towards that redefinition.

 [View some "living pictures" here.] 

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