Find your focus, even after you take the photo

Tech blogs everywhere are buzzing with Adobe’s latest innovation of plenoptic lenses. If you haven’t heard the term yet, don’t worry you will.

What some bloggers are calling “a new groundbreaking technology that would change the (face of) Photography forever” is not ready for the consumer market just yet. Raytix, a Dutch camera company offers a line of high end plenoptic cameras but the effective resolution is only up to 3 megapixels. Judging by the amount of geek drool generated when it was unveiled, however, once it’s commercialized and able to fit on an SRL body it won’t be long before plenoptic lenses are an industry standard.

The plenoptic lens is actually a superfluity of tiny sub lenses held together between the camera’s lens and the image sensor. This records what appears to be a fragmented image but is essentially individual information on different rays of light that capture multiple perspectives. It appears as a strange mosaic pattern where each block contains a chunk of the image as a whole.

With savvy software knowledge, the image can be rendered to bring any area into focus making the depth of field fluid. Basically the ultimate dream of every crime scene investigator ever on TV, the image can be enhanced to focus on anything. Once fully developed Adobe hopes to ease the limits photographers face when shooting at a distance and or in low light.

Digital light field photography has been developing for years. It’s principles in the plentopic lens let photographers take stereoscopic 3D images on the go as well as post-production focusing. When advances like these become readily available instilled in consumer products the face of photography will change as much as it did with the revolution of color film and HD technology.

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By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a multimedia developer, business owner, and work-from-home mom.