With cameras being implanted in all sorts of things like phones and iPads, we lose track of how amazing photography really is. The tiny lenses and sensors in those random implants uses the same basic method as almost all digital photography, a technology that basically mimics film photography.
Cameras that you can buy in the store nowadays that are digital are generally based on film camera shapes, as designers just placed the digital sensor in the spot that the light-sensitive film paper would be. Strangely this hasn't really changed. I've read that there is a type of digital camera that is trying to buck the film camera design philosophy, but it get's a little technical for here.
What I'm talking about in the title of this post, the great new "Big Thing" in digital photography is the first new innovation and change in how photography is approached in more than a hundred years.
I'm talking about the light field camera. Designed by a Stanford scientist, a light field camera houses nearly a dozen lenses and captures light rays from all directions towards which the camera is pointed.
What does that mean practically? It means that you never have to focus the camera, but it goes farther. You focus the picture after the fact. Because of the data gathered by the lenses, you get the opportunity to make different photos from the same image capture simply by changing what you want to focus on. The fact you get to choose what to focus on after the case is new and novel.
If you spend a second to examine the Lytro web site I've linked to, you can see the wildly simple design on the camera, an electronic Snickers bar almost. It only has two buttons--"On" and the shutter release. It charges like a phone, doesn't have a memory card insert (the styles of camera are categorized by Gigabytes of memory), and is the least intimidating camera-exclusive product out there.
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