Photos: Eric Cheng/Lytro
Single Snapshot: With light-field photography, an image can be focused
after it is taken, as shown here with one of Lytro’s “living pictures.” Just click on a part of the image you want to bring into focus.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched out tanks, helicopters, and mechanical calculators centuries before the first examples were built. Now another of his flights of imagination has finally been realized—an imaging device capable of capturing every optical aspect of the scene before it.
Lytro, a Silicon Valley start‑up, has just launched the world’s first consumer light-field camera, which shoots pictures that can be focused long after they’re captured, either on the camera itself or online. Lytro promises no more blurry subjects, and no shutter lag waiting for the camera’s lens to focus. A software update to the camera, coming soon, will even let you produce 3-D images.
Light-field technology heralds one
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