Thursday, June 23, 2011

Lytro: Another Color?

Earliest Niépce camera, 1826Image via WikipediaThis is not me saying Color fell off the cliff. I don't know. I carry a bulky camera, which means I hardly ever have a camera on me. And for me it is about what I see with my eyes. Where I am, what I am looking at, that particular view. That specific frame. The camera I believe is secondary to photography. And I believe most moments should not be captured. If you love butterflies, you don't become a butterfly collector. And there is some quantum mechanics thrown in. If you get too precise with the location of the particle, you miss out on the velocity. The freeze frame quality of picture taking can rob you of the full experience. Put that camera away, please.

Except when you decide you are going to take pictures for hours on end.

Williamsburg (1)
Williamsburg (2)
Williamsburg (3)

Hundreds more to come as early as tomorrow.

But then I was looking at this Lytro picture and a cold shiver ran down my spine. When you click on the sword, the artist disappears - artist, as in martial artist - and when you click on the artist, the sword disappears. That is problematic, to me it is.


I am pressed for time. I want point and click. I want to get it right the first time and I almost always do. And my camera is several years old. But then like I said, it is not about the camera. It is about the frame. It is about where I am and what I am seeing.


Don't tell me my shot is not better than the Lytro shot.

Color Doldrums: Fail Whale?
Ben Horowitz: Lytro and the Magic Camera: Since 1826, when French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first permanent image photograph, photography has worked in essentially the same way. A plane of light is captured on some medium. Now that medium has changed quite a bit over the years from paper soaked in silver chloride to silver plated copper coated with silver iodide to more recently random access computer memory, but the medium always captures a plane of light. On the front-end features like autofocus, flash, and others have been added to better capture that plane of light, but it’s still been just that plane. It’s always been that way until right now.
Enhanced by Zemanta

2 comments:

Kate said...

Hi Paramendra,

I personally really like the photo with the martial artists and the sword. The dimension you get is really intriguing. Although your photo is of course great, too. I know what you mean about not carrying a camera around always because they can be so bulky; I’m really trying to remember mine more often because I often see pretty things in nature that I want to capture.

The Lytro tech seems really awesome for people who need a little help taking professional-quality photos, but I don’t think most people will be able to afford it if it’s too expensive. The CEO Ng said it will cost under $10k, which is obviously way too much for most people, so it will be interesting to see if the company prices it for the consumer since they said it’s supposed to be for the consumer market.

I wanted to share this video on the Lytro tech with you. I think you’ll appreciate how it analyzes news coverage from different sources to show various perspectives on the impact the cameras will make. I hope you’ll consider embedding the video in your post.

http://www.newsy.com/videos/lytro-to-revolutionize-photo-technology/


Thanks,
Kate

Paramendra Kumar Bhagat said...

Hi Kate, here goes: Lytro: A High End Product? http://bit.ly/lO8XEZ