The mess at the corner of my desk :-


The image/animation above is shot with the first generation Lytro Camera.
If you are not familiar with it, it is the first commercially available “Light Field” camera. This is a single image. Unlike traditional digital camera sensors that capture information about color and light intensity, a fine formation of tiny lenses in front of the camera sensor give Light field cameras the ability to capture the direction of light too. Amongst other things, this simply translates to the possibility of focusing on any part of a single image, after its capture. This is different to focus stacking. In this case, a series of focus points has been converted to a short animation. All from a single image.

 

First Generation Lytro

First Generation Lytro

First generation Lytro was also a unique and funky small cubic shape.

At 4.4 inches long, and 1.6 inch high, its weight is 7.5 ounces or just over 200 grams. Builtin WiFi, that pairs with your free Lytro mobile Apps too. Rechargeable battery via micro USB port, that is also used for upload to the PC or Mac.

The 1.5 inch LCD display is quite poor with very narrow viewing angle, but for the price, it’s still fun and a good research.

Available in a handful of cheerful colors, there are two main models with either 8Gig or 16Gig build-in storage that are otherwise identical.

Main Lens is a constant f/2 aperture with 8x optical zoom.

Lytro has built a very nice free desktop app to manage your images and generate short animations like the one above. They also offer a cool ecosystem on their website to keep and publish your captures.

It will be interesting to see if in the years to come, we’ll see this technology in many places, including our smartphones.

Lytro is now selling a newer more powerful and with better everything (lens, sensor, form factor, etc.) The Lytro Illum model.

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