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[leica at jayburleson.com (Jay Burleson)]

Capture a Light-Field and Digitally Manipulate It, It'll Last Longer
BY LORE SJ?BERG 12.03.12

Original at: 
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/12/alt-text-light-field-camera

Cameras have, for over a hundred years, occupied kind of a strange place 
in the pop-tech landscape. Capable of producing sublime fine art, yet 
more often used to produce largely indistinguishable pictures of 
preschoolers crying while wearing a party hat, it's hard to name another 
medium that would create such a high-profile gap between high art and 
painful dreck until the invention of karaoke in the '80s.

Since the Brownie camera came out --- around the time President McKinley 
and Queen Victoria died unexpected and extremely expected deaths 
respectively --- there have been various technological attempts to 
bridge that gap and make a camera that turns anyone into Ansel Adams or 
Annie Leibovitz without having to develop film, learn what an F-stop is, 
or look at Iggy Pop naked.

One of the major steps toward this ideal was, of course, the creation of 
the instant camera, which put the entire process of photography, from 
film to picture to your grandchildren going through the photos in the 
attic after you're dead and wondering who the crying child in the party 
hat is, into the hands of the end user. It also gave OutKast a killer hook.

Part of the success of the Polaroid camera, of course, is that the 
creators had the foresight to make sure the resulting pictures strangely 
off-color and overexposed, giving them what reporter Edward R. Murrow 
called "a hip, retro look, evoking the mix of nostalgia and alienation 
that characterized, you know, right now." Influential Depression-era 
photographer Dorothea Lange expressed her hope that in sixty years the 
aesthetic of the Polaroid would be adopted by millions of 
upper-middle-class young people and incorporated into photos of their 
new back tattoos.

The most recent addition to the pantheon, or perhaps parthenon (I always 
get those mixed up) of photograph technology is the "light-field" 
camera, which takes a picture where you can digitally adjust the focus 
of the photo after the fact. This brings us closer to the point where no 
thought or consideration has to be put into a photo at all, which of 
course will increase the quality of amateur photography tenfold. It will 
also allow people to claim that traditional, fixed-focus photos are 
"warmer" and spend thousands of dollars on recreations of plastic-lens 
point-and-shoots so they can brag to their friends.

I do hope that this trend continues, and that future cameras will 
further eliminate the need to make decisions while taking photos. 
Presumably at some point technology will be so advanced, and storage so 
cheap, that we'll just continually take 360-degree photos of every event 
we go to, and then advanced photographic AI will sort through them to 
find shots where your friends are passed out in funny positions.

And, at some point beyond that, our lives will be routinely recorded and 
automatically uploaded to social networks, along with plaintive begging 
for people to "like" them. There are, of course, profound privacy and 
cultural issues that tag along with such panoptical technology, but I 
think we can all agree that it will lead to some really cute cat pictures.

;-)
-- 
Jay,

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