photography is about light. the future of it is in light fields.
Maya ! The madness of it - in the Age of the "Light Field."
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/12/alt-text-light-field-camera/
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:33
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