Since the advent of the digital camera, we take more and more photos. We shoot away happily, because the cost of taking an extra photo is zero. The combination of a smartphone with a camera and social media has caused the number of photos online to explode. Lytro recently introduced their new camera, specifically intended for taking photos ('living images') for social media. ' Shoot first, focus later .'
The Lytro doesn't really look like a camera. Just look at its shape, a rectangular model of about 11.2 x 4.1 x 4.1 cm. It has two buttons, a slider and a USB port. But the most special thing is in the camera, the Lytro is a light field camera . Lytro was founded by Ren Ng who received his PhD in light field photography from Stanford in 2006 (his thesis can be found here ). Steve Jobs was interested in this form of photography and talked to Ren Ng about using light field photography in the iPhone.
Light field?
A light field camera (or plenoptic camera) is very different from a normal camera. In front of the imaging sensor is a micro-lens array (130,000 microscopic lenses). This registers a 4D image (light from every point in a 3D environment, including the direction, the fourth dimension). What is recorded are actually 130,000 small images that are all slightly different. The software in the camera ensures that a 3D image is created, where you can later choose what you want to focus on and shift the perspective yourself.
The micro-lens array also makes it possible to record 3D images with a lightfield lens, normally you need two lenses for that. To make it simple, you could say that you don't take one photo of an object, but dozens, all with a different focus. In concrete terms, this means that you can take a photo and then adjust the focus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3UGP0cNNfE
Experimenting
That doesn't mean that taking pictures with a Lytro will immediately produce great ' living images ', on the contrary. You will really have to experiment with the camera and see how you can make beautiful compositions with this camera. For example with the Creative mode of the camera. What you can do with it at the moment is still quite limited. You can make close-ups or photos at a greater distance with the 8x zoom. There are now about ten filters available that you can put over the images, the Glass filter for example shows depth nicely in the photo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6r7UdTIfM4
Specially for social media
A photo you take with your smartphone can easily be shared on social media, but the photo is then… as it is. If you would have preferred the back to be sharp, you should have taken a photo of that and uploaded it. A 'living image' can be focused by the person viewing the image, on the point that he or she finds beautiful. So it is more than a photo. Hence the name 'living image'.
Stock photography
Will this cause a revolution in stock photography? That remains to be seen. A 'living image' is something fundamentally different. It is also not to be hoped that stock agencies will see these images as a lot of photos together and therefore increase the price enormously. The big difference is the resolution. Depending on what the image is intended for (print or online), you need a minimum number of pixels. For high-quality printing, the resolution is of course much higher than for an image of 595 x 595 pixels here on Frankwatching.
The Lytro's resolution is 1080 x 1080 pixels, or about 1.2 MP. That's nothing compared poland mobile phone number list to the resolution of an average smartphone camera or the whopping 41 MP of the Nokia Lumia 1200 . The Lytro is really meant for social media use.
Print?
So you can't do much with living images in terms of printing. If you make a jpg from a living image (via the desktop software), the maximum size for printing a photo is 13 x 13 cm (the photos are square). I had a number of photos printed at Hema and have to say that the quality is 'okay', but not great. The fact that Hema cannot handle this format (only with Instagram images) is particularly annoying. Because if you want to keep the image, you will have two white strips left.
Perhaps there will be a separate category for stock photo suppliers: living images . Because based on what we already see in Lytro's gallery , it is a new way of photographing with new compositions. You can discover the Rijksmuseum in a new way, zooming in on a detail with other art objects in the background. Below are two photos with a different focus of one original living image :
Editing living images . First of all, you can do this on the Lytro's screen, but this is not very practical due to its small size. You can also do this on your computer (Mac and Windows 7/8) via the desktop software. You then connect the Lytro to your computer with a micro USB cable: a better option, but not entirely bug-free (I could not put living images on Facebook). If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, you can also download, edit and transfer the images to social media via the Lytro's built-in wifi.