Thursday, August 14, 2014

Lytro Illum Camera – Photography Just Got Better

When Lytro first introduced its light field camera two years ago, it shook up not just photography, but of technology in general.

Lytro Illum is classified as THE camera of the future and its time that you forgot just about everything else that you knew about photography.

Image courtesy : (http://uncrate.com/stuff/lytro-illum-camera/ )

Everybody knows that blurred photos cannot be made sharp after the fact but now it has all been changed with the new $1600 Lytro Illum Camera.

The Illum’s positive points are that it has a cool, futuristic design using light-field photography that take perfect shots that often feels like magic. It also has helpful tools for showing you how to shoot, however, most of the amateur photographers might find both the software and hardware a bit too buggy, albeit expensive, not to mention the difficulty in importing and editing the images. To make matters worse, if you are not a bit careful, you might miss the perfect image.

However, the photographer has to have some technical and artistical strengths as when they work with the Illum, because they have to visualize each image in a 3D format. If everything is in the same plane, then it would just look like any other photo. While it is easy to take photos of portraits, landscape photography is altogether different as you have to learn to give each item that required depth.

Instead of snapping a solitary image, the Illum captures a million light rays in a sequence what it calls a light field. In other words, it uses light field technology to take photos that could be refocused after the fact.

IMAGE-1

IMAGE – 2

IMAGE – 3

(Image courtesy : http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/lytro-illum-the-future-gets-pretty-17062472 )

The above three examples are so called living images that are designed to be interactive so that the viewer can discover the different parts of the image. The new Illum makes all of this accessible to the average photographer.

The Illum is a second generation camera. While the last one was a testament to prove light-field photography, this one is a statement to announce the arrival of its second generation. In short, it is the marriage of present and future, with more emphasis on the future. The Illum comes with a superb lens, a bit baggy and hefty body, and comes with a lot of manual controls. It is heavier than the usual cameras that you have to use both hands. It looks a reduced DSLR as you can see from the image. More specifications can be found by CLICKING HERE

Lastly, for those who think the Illum is expensive, it is better that they run a check on the prices of those digital or telephoto compact fixed camera lenses in Amazon or Ebay and they will be surprised to see the prices of even the used ones. Comparatively, the Illum provides more value for money. Besides, this is only the second generation and they are only going to improve with time. As Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal aptly puts it “we are only just getting started and hope to do much, much more in the future”.

Having said that, there is little mistaking the Lytro Illum for anything else, but a camera of the future.



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