Nikon Rumors Forum » Topic: A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later

Super Shooter on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

Super Shooter — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:19:39 +0000

TaoTeJared said:
And really, how many Cat photos have you seen made with a Leica S2?

Why do I always have to be the one to prove you wrong? You would be so surprised with how many cat photos people take!

Yes these are photos from a Leica S2.

speye_21 on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

speye_21 — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:26:27 +0000

This technology has been around for a while. I've seen it first hand at SIGGraph the past few years. The original implementation will not fit inside a point-and-shoot camera. It will need to be dumbed down to do that.

Basically the system is comprised of a lens array, an image sensor, and a computer. Light passes through the lens array and strikes the sensor in multiple places. The computer reads incoming data and determines which part of the image are in focus and which parts are out of focus. Lenses contributing to out of focus parts of the image are repositioned until the image data it produces is in focus. When all parts of the image are in focus, the computer records a final image along with the positions of all the contributing lenses. Since lens characteristics are known, software can compute the depth of field using parallax information. This information is then used by editing software to manipulate the focused and unfocused areas in the image dynamically. Data can be processed quickly by your computer's GPU for near realtime feedback. The demo I saw was on an ordinary laptop and was almost realtime feedback. The slowest part of the system was adjusting the lenses.

TaoTeJared on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

TaoTeJared — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:52:59 +0000

Super Shooter said:
Great, now newbies will have another computer gimick to ruin perfectly good photos with. Do we really need to see 10 different versions of focus on a single cat photo? Haven't computers ruined enough photos with extreme saturation, sharpening, and HDR?

What would Ansel Adams do?

Do you know how many prints Ansel Adams made of just one single photo? Burning, dodging, etc. He didn't even shoot much his last 20 years of life and spent most of his time in the darkroom. ;)

Who knows what 10 years will bring and what systems we will be using. The cost of this camera system will be way beyond almost all of us either way. And really, how many Cat photos have you seen made with a Leica S2?

Super Shooter on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

Super Shooter — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:10:55 +0000

Great, now newbies will have another computer gimick to ruin perfectly good photos with. Do we really need to see 10 different versions of focus on a single cat photo? Haven't computers ruined enough photos with extreme saturation, sharpening, and HDR?

What would Ansel Adams do?

TaoTeJared on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

TaoTeJared — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:59:53 +0000

SkintBrit said:
More time in front of the computer, Arrhhh!

No kidding! I bet there could be some interesting Images with editing you could do with it. Tilt-shift on steroids on demand comes to mind.

shutteredglass on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

shutteredglass — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:15:26 +0000

The article I read stated the creator's PhD dissertation won some sort of award at Stanford in 2006 - I gotta imagine Nikon, Sony, Canon, etc probably noticed this and have had this on their collective radar. At least I hope they have.
It does seem like a really cool technology but I gotta wonder about the processing times to record an image like that. On the upside it seems like this or a related tech could do wonders at the upper end of the ISO range. We shall see....

DutchNikon on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

DutchNikon — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:32:33 +0000

It says : "The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles" so i guess it will need multiple lenses for all those angles....

We'll wait and see wath happens.....

alchse on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

alchse — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:14:48 +0000

SkintBrit said:
More time in front of the computer, Arrhhh!

thats what I was thinking

The photo rumors site has an interview up with the founder....pretty interesting

SkintBrit on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

SkintBrit — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:56:44 +0000

More time in front of the computer, Arrhhh!

Krevlin on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

Krevlin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:54:53 +0000

I wanted to post this 3 days ago but login problems prevented me.

What are the chances this guy pulls it off?

Because he says he doesn't want to license it to Canon or Nikon but I could see tons of P&S flocking to it and I know some lazy photographers would love it.

NikoDoby on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

NikoDoby — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:16:34 +0000

This tech has been around a long time already. We've talked about computational photography before. Adobe has even shown off prototypes.

http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=740

alchse on "A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later"

alchse — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:43:26 +0000

Thoughts?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/technology/22camera.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp