Light Field Camera—Perfect Travel Compact Camera?

I recently received a complimentary copy of Victor – the new magazine from Hasselblad. It’s an oversized magazine with beautiful photography. Among these beautiful photos was an article entitled, Shoot First, Focus Later. It described a type of camera where you could refocus an image after you’ve taken the picture. There are actually prototypes of this thing built by Ren Ng and his collaborators at Stanford University using a 16 mp Kodak digital back.

It would be great to have one of these, wouldn’t it? How many times have you looked at that LCD and thought, yes “I got the shot” but upon returning to the studio, the picture is just slightly out of focus. The light field camera would solve this problem. Wouldn’t it be great to have a “refocusing” slider in your raw converter where you could change the focus by just sliding it forwards or backwards?

It occurred to me while reading this article that you could not only refocus but also do tilts, swings, and shift “virtually.” Wouldn’t that be so cool. You would no longer need a bulky view camera for this, just bring your light field camera ( which looks like a regular camera) and shoot to your heart’s content without worrying about perfect focus or whether you should swing/tilt the lens this way or that way. Schleimpflug principle would just be amazing because now you can do it in software. This would be the perfect travel camera and for still life as well. Who needs live preview anyway? Also I wouldn’t need an Alpa Travel Compact that I’ve been dreaming about for so long now.

Published 5 October 07 · Previously: 

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Comments


wow - this is really kewl. How can I get a copy of this magazine? I want to buy one of these cameras do you know how much they cost?

— Jon Frank · 10 September 07

Hi Jon- sorry didn't mention this but these are just prototypes. They won't be available commercially for another 10-15 years according to the article. I think you can subscribe to the magazine by going to hasselblad.com

— Jonah · 10 September 07