100% Pure Petroleum Jelliffe

One day with the Lytro

On Friday, my new Lytro Lightfield camera arrived. I put my money where my early-adopting mouth is, so I could see what the future of photography held. Overall, I’d say it’s pretty neat but it’s got a long way to go.

I can’t seem to embed any of the images into this post so you’ll have to see the rest of the images I posted on my Lytro page:
http://pictures.lytro.com/pete.jelliffe

My thoughts so far:

Good
1. The form factor is great. It feels like a lightsaber: solid but not heavy, futuristic, fits perfectly in your hand
2. The magnetic lens cap is neat. It just snaps into place.
3. Touch screen controls are easy to pick up, because they’re basically a subset of the iPhone’s
4. 8GB storage and great battery life. TOok 100 photos and only used about a quarter of the battery.

Bad
1. There’s no “file” you can send around. Photos are only shareable via Ltyro’s site and Facebook. I can’t even save out a version of a photo unless I take a screenshot.
2. It’s hard to take a photo where both the background and foreground are of interest, and you wouldn’t just want all of it in focus at one time. Lytro sort of solves a problem no one had, namely refocusing your image after it’s taken.
3. Image compression is pretty severe in some cases, and the image quality is on par with a camera phone (worse than an iPhone)
3a. Low-light performance is really grainy. I need to look up how large the sensor is, to see whether that’s to blame.
4. The photo management software is pretty basic. Lytro organizes photos into “stories” on its website, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to create or manage stories form the desktop. That’s why you’ll see all of my “stories” only have 1 photo in them.
5. I thought I’d be able to manipulate the photos more after I took them. I can tap to refocus anywhere on the image, but I thought I’d be able to more like play with exposure settings and alter the aperture size. For example, it seems like I should be able to bracket the photo up or down to optimally expose different regions of the image. Or changing the f/stop to bring more of the image into focus at any given time.
6. The magnetic lens cap isn’t magnetic enough. It came off in my coat pocket several times. And it’s not tethered to the camera at all, so it’s easy to lose (and probably hard to replace given you can only order these cameras online currently).

Questions/Ideas
1. Lightfield photos are a little like holograms. It’s 2D, that is it’s displayed on a flat surface, but has depth information. Holograms show depth, but sacrifice accurate colors, so this is a step up
2. I’d love to play with the focal length more. I can’t control how the camera zooms, but I could feel the lens zooming or refocusing as I took pictures. It’d be nice to go wide angle or telephoto.
3. Does lightfield photography support changing the f/stop after the photo is taken? The default f/stop is f/2 form the metadata of all my photos. A larger aperture means a shallower depth of field, which brings only a few things into focus at a time. Couldn’t you use this to export an image where everything is in focus, by only outputting the focused versions of each region of the image? Just like an HDR image composites only the well expose regions of a photo, lightfield images could composite only the focused parts.

Again, here are the photos: http://pictures.lytro.com/pete.jelliffe

Anyone else out there have on yet? What do you think?