Should You Order One?

A lot can happen between now and Spring. Light seems to have moved from a business plan of building camera modules for mobile phone manufacturers to include in handsets, to a selling directly to consumers. But their Plan A is, very likely, everyone’s Plan A. My estimate is that within two to four years, technology like this will be commonplace in mobile phones.

I’ve been hoping that would be true for a while now, so I might be overly optimistic. Apple can barely squeeze their single tiny camera into their current iPhone. Digital imaging maestro and former Apple employee Ron Brinkmann wrote about the possibilities of a bug-eyed camera array in an iPhone back in 2011 when the Lytro was announced.

It seems inevitable that the future of mobile phone photography is multi-capture computational, but it’s not clear exactly when that future will be. Light is promising to put it in your hands early next year. But I’d guess they’re also working on making their technology available to others at the same time.

What I Like

Lytro seemed positively obsessed with the idea that their cameras made a new thing called “Live Photos,” meaning the focus and parallax hijinks should be exposed to the viewer, rather than provided to the photographer as editing tools with the goal of producing a superior traditional photographic result. It’s fun to play with in their gallery, but it’s not photography. When I make a photo, I frame it. I decide what you see, and that includes focus. Focus is framing in depth. When you ask the viewer to chose it for you, it’s like beginning to tell them a joke, and then asking them to provide the punchline. It’s dissatisfying to them, and an abdication of your responsibilities as a photographer.

I like that Light seems to be dispensing with this technological showcasing and focusing on giving photographers tools to make the best pictures possible.

I also really like that whole thing about perfect focus every time, a 35-150mm zoom at ƒ/1.2, great low-light performance and more resolution than a Hasselblad.

It simply seems miraculous, and I want it all.

These Are Our Concerns

I am always suspicious of miracles in photography. At best, they may result images that appear to have had miracles worked on them.

We romanticize lenses in part because lenses are weird. Strange things happen with them. Have you ever noticed a background distorting along the edge of an out-of-focus foreground? Or how heat ripples refocus light? How spectacular (and hard to fake) anamorphic lens flares are? Or how sharp silhouettes appear in big circles of boke? Look at this shot from Nocturne: