Farewell to the fine art of focusing | Technology | The Observer
No such thing as a dud shot: two versions of the same picture of the Empire State Building in New York. In the first (left), the tower and a faint rainbow to the right of the building can be seen; in the second, the raindrops on the window pane through which the shot was taken spring sharply into focus.
"From today painting is dead" is an aphorism often attributed to Paul Delaroche, a 19th-century French painter, upon seeing the first daguerreotypes (though Wikipedia maintains there is no compelling evidence that he actually said it). In a way, it was a misjudgment on the same epic scale as Thomas Watson's celebrated observation that the total world market for computers was five machines. What Delaroche was presumably getting at was that painting as a naturalistic representation of reality was terminally threatened by the arrival of the new technology of "painting with light". If that is indeed what he meant, then he was only partly right.
What brought Delaroche to mind was the announcement of the Lytro light field camera, which goes on sale next year. Based on some discoveries made by a Stanford student, Ren Ng, the camera turns the normal process of compose-focus-shoot on its head. Instead you just point the Lytro at whatever you want to photograph, and then you can retrospectively focus in on any part of the image. As the New York Times explained: "With Lytro's camera, you can focus on any point in an image taken with a Lytro after you've shot the picture. When viewing a Lytro photograph on your computer, you can simply click your mouse on any point in the image and that area will come into focus. Change the focal point from the flower to the child holding the flower. Make the background blurry and the foreground clear. Do the opposite – you can change the focal point as many times as you like."
The science behind the camera is both arcane and fascinating. The idea of a "light field" – the amount of light travelling in every direction through every point in space – is a central concept in imaging science. It fully defines how a scene appears. The first light fields were captured at Stanford University over 15 years ago and required a roomful of cameras tethered to a supercomputer. But Moore's Law (which says that computing power doubles every 18 months) has now worked its magic and the supercomputer has been shrunk to something that can fit in a consumer device.
The company behind the technology calls it "focusing after the fact". It explains that since the camera captures the colour, intensity and direction of all the light, "you can experience the first major light field capability… Focus and refocus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at any time, after the fact".
"From today painting is dead" is an aphorism often attributed to Paul Delaroche, a 19th-century French painter, upon seeing the first daguerreotypes (though Wikipedia maintains there is no compelling evidence that he actually said it). In a way, it was a misjudgment on the same epic scale as Thomas Watson's celebrated observation that the total world market for computers was five machines. What Delaroche was presumably getting at was that painting as a naturalistic representation of reality was terminally threatened by the arrival of the new technology of "painting with light". If that is indeed what he meant, then he was only partly right.
What brought Delaroche to mind was the announcement of the Lytro light field camera, which goes on sale next year. Based on some discoveries made by a Stanford student, Ren Ng, the camera turns the normal process of compose-focus-shoot on its head. Instead you just point the Lytro at whatever you want to photograph, and then you can retrospectively focus in on any part of the image. As the New York Times explained: "With Lytro's camera, you can focus on any point in an image taken with a Lytro after you've shot the picture. When viewing a Lytro photograph on your computer, you can simply click your mouse on any point in the image and that area will come into focus. Change the focal point from the flower to the child holding the flower. Make the background blurry and the foreground clear. Do the opposite – you can change the focal point as many times as you like."
The science behind the camera is both arcane and fascinating. The idea of a "light field" – the amount of light travelling in every direction through every point in space – is a central concept in imaging science. It fully defines how a scene appears. The first light fields were captured at Stanford University over 15 years ago and required a roomful of cameras tethered to a supercomputer. But Moore's Law (which says that computing power doubles every 18 months) has now worked its magic and the supercomputer has been shrunk to something that can fit in a consumer device.
The company behind the technology calls it "focusing after the fact". It explains that since the camera captures the colour, intensity and direction of all the light, "you can experience the first major light field capability… Focus and refocus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at any time, after the fact".
