For the camera enthusiast: Stanford's Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera

Tim

Could you explain for a non-camera-enthusiast why you'd like one?

Deane

that looks cool. Any idea how it's done?

It looks like you can take a picture without focusing, and then do the focusing later on.

Also a new type of film that sounds almost too good to be true.

Hi Deane,

Obviously a "conventional" camera focuses on a particuar point of the composition - anything closer or further away will then be out of focus.

I guess that in simple terms, the image captured by this camera is "3-dimensional" and will allow you to refocus the composition after the image has been captured.

In fact since posting this article I have read a good (simple!) explanation in Wired about the camera/research, you may want to have a look at it.

Although clearly very cleaver, it does seem a tadge lazy for those that should be learning to use a camera (Like me)

You could see the use for the press where time issues probably often result in out of focus shots. Just depends if the camera is as quick as conventional digital.

quote:

Photojournalists and news photographers, especially, are strict about what can be done to an image after it's shot, he said. For some, tweaking a photo after the fact, even if only to refocus, might not fly, he said.

I wonder if many professional photographers would claim this was tweaking, since it's the equivalent of taking thousands of shots with an ordinary camera and choosing one of them.

quote:

Originally posted by JeremyD:
I wonder if many professional photographers would claim this was tweaking, since it's the equivalent of taking thousands of shots with an ordinary camera and choosing one of them.

Webcam photography!

quote:

Originally posted by Tim Collins:
Wonder when this technology will filter down to consumer use, as it undoubtedly will?
Tim

Probably not any time soon if it takes a 16mp digital back to produce the paltry resolution shown.

This is very interesting, as it almost defies the physics of the camera lens.

The implications must be for low light, macro and telephoto photography.

Assuming one can shoot in low light at maximum aperture and then increase the DOF later, the need for photographic lighting will change totally, however Digital sensors are already quite good in low light, and I would have thought that the noise seen at high iso's on digital cameras will improve with future generation CCD's. If this is the case, this panoptic technology will not be that influential in low light photography.

Macro photography that historically has wafer thin DOF could benefit from this as oe could select the exact plane of the focus, this might help those particularly who do wildlife macro of insects etc. The same applies to shooting telephoto at say 500mm or more.

Simon