Lytro Light Field Camera

this is really what the cameras looks like

This little camera is like no other. Except perhaps the other Lytro camera (of which more later). It takes photographs as “light fields”. Rather than focusing an mage on a sensor, the Lytro uses tiny “micro lenses” in front of the sensor to create a pattern describing the light rays arriving at each point in the picture. Pictures are created by processing the light field pattern, which means that you can do funky things like focus a picture after you have taken it. You can even make videos of the focus changing…

The video above was created from a single Lytro picture. You make these using the Lytro application which you can download from here. You can even get this to run on Windows 11.

You can pick up Lytro cameras for not much money. I got one and the pictures and performance were rubbish. But then I upgraded the software to the most recent version and things got significantly better. If you get one and want to upgrade it you need to use the Lytro application which tries to fetch the upgrade firmware from a long dead Lytro site. But you can get round this by patching a code file to redirect update requests to a site that does have the required files. I did this and felt very “hackery”. You can find out more details here.

Look Ma! I’m patching a binary!

Light Field Photography was a fantastic idea which didn’t survive the collision with reality. The focus party trick is achieved at the expense of a huge downgrade in quality and the arrival of a whole bunch of image artefacts. That said, I quite like the pictures the camera makes, and you don’t need 20 megapixels for every photograph you take.

Lytro survived the indifferent reception of their first model to make another camera which had a much higher performance sensor and processor and produced much better pictures, but ultimately it was killed by smartphones providing the same kind of focus trickery by using depth cameras and lots of image processing. That said, it is fun to play with and if you are a camera nerd you could do worse that get one. You can find out more about the camera here.