1st Generation Lytro Versus A Real Camera! Fight! Light-Field Photography In the Field!

The 1st Generation Lytro
light-field camera.

Less Violence Than Expected!

OK, you got me. After reading far, far too much linkbait phrasing, it's almost impossible to let go of the stuff if you have the opportunity to go with it. That's the true, hidden danger of dealing with such toxic material. 

One weird trick that'll keep you from reading headlines for the rest of your life!

Ahem. That's not what we're here for.

The Rebel T3, token
human-technology device.

Instead, we're here to talk about cameras and alien technology. If not alien technology, certainly technology that's alien to the experience of most of the photograph-taking public. The kind of alien technology that lets you take a shot, then feed it into your computer and be able to adjust the planes of focus with a mouse-stroke, adjust the aperture from f/1 to f/16 with a slider, even define areas of complete sharpness against areas of perfect out-of-focus.

It's really kind of weird and exotic if you stop to think about it. To do that, you'd have to capture several images, all at roughly the same time, calculate the offsets of each fragment, reconstitute a singular image taking into account the distance between your calculated planes, and allow synthetic lens blur to be added in or removed in a totally post-hoc fashion.

That's what the Lytro camera does. It's about as insane as you'd think.

Lytro as a company popped up in 2006, promising all kinds of goodies for photographers, including cameras made from bits of spacecraft found in and around Area 51. Or Ren Ng's comprehensive Stanford thesis, whichever was more accessible. In 2011, they brought out their first generation camera, so alien that they didn't even bother sticking a cool name on it, just "Lytro's first-generation camera." It's shaped like a rectangular prism, made of brushed aluminum, ridged rubber, a solid mass of glass, and -- rumoured -- the tears of ten-thousand orphan children. Whatever it's made from, when it came out I instantaneously said, "I've got to get me one of these!" right before my eye hit the $500 price tag for the 16Gb models.

The Lytro Illum.
Many Bothans died to bring us this image.

Fast forward a few years. Lytro has dissected the eye-holes of the Roswell crash survivors a bit more and taken the opportunity to build and release an even more powerful (and more traditionally designed) camera using beefed up light-field technology, the Illum.

This is the professional version of the light-field technology engineering. Four times more resolution in the notional luminary hyperspace as the first-gen offering, Considerably larger, allowing a much more detailed depth map to be created with far more shades of relief, giving even greater flexibility in choosing focal planes. A design which resembles nothing quite so much as an alien weapon, hungering to fling bolts of coruscating energy at the unwary. An intense and demanding piece of kit which forces photographers out of their comfort zones and into thinking about composition in a whole new way.

They don't appear to like that much. Me, I love it.

What I don't like is the $1,600 price tag. Ouch.

But we're three or more years on from the original release! In the intervening time, I've branched out my curiosity and fascinations into diverse fields. Audio engineering! Video composition! Motion FX! And even more strange, esoteric fields that good ol' John Dee would have feared to tread, where languages as simple as Enochian are insufficient to express one's hungers: Structure-From-Motion, , hyperlapses, and other things too horrible to mention here, but which I discovered by accident has an actual technical term attached for scholars to endlessly argue about: computational photography.

That includes light-field research.

Surely the first-generation light-field camera would be cheaper than when it first came out, right? 

Surprisingly, not on Lytro's store. Or at least not much. $250 is what you'll drop for one of those big, red bad-boys, which is a little too steep for what's going to be a totally experimental camera to see what its good for.

Luckily, we have technology. eBay to the rescue! And by rescue, what I mean is a positive swarm of first-generation Lytro cameras in the sub-$100 range, which is exactly what I was looking to drop on something of pure curiosity.

Bundled up, shipped off, received, and in my hot little tentacles for under a C-note. This is off to a fine start!

My roommate is a traditional photographer with a traditional photographer's collection of gear. This is a good thing because, aside from my ability to indulge in gross set-building challenges, there's always at least one solid traditional camera around for image acquisition, lights and reflectors for lighting control, and a room that's turned into a Frankenstein's monster of a weird studio. It also meant that I could borrow her and drag her off to a nearby location to shoot similar things to compare and contrast the results.

Up front, this is my first tinkering shoot with the Lytro. I'm sure there are a dozen things to do to improve things (including more manual control and using the ND filter). First cut, first go, experiment time.

In particular, we'll be talking about Lytro images from the following set:



And comparing/contrasting them with images from this set:

https://www.facebook.com/dawn.m.jones.10/media_set?set=a.10152545353715044.1073741852.681685043&type=1

Sigh. Not everyone can leverage awesome online gallery solutions, apparently.

Let's start with one of the more straightforward comparisons.

From the Rebel set, looking under the bridge over stoney water.

No Prince jokes, please.

Compare to:

I'll be the first to admit that the Rebel image is far superior in detail and colour representation. Without a doubt. The original image from which that section was cropped was 5000px wide or more and this is 2048 before being scaled down to fit on this page. The Lytro image is 1080px x 1080px and cannot be exported for print, for reasons you've already discovered if you've moused over the thing or touched it on your mobile device. It shifts the point of view and by clicking around, you can change the focal plane from the nearest rocks to the far end of the under-bridge.

Consider this likewise 2k export from the Rebel:

De-railed?

Compared to:



Again, the Lytro image is limited to 1080 x 1080, which is as good as its going to get for the first-generation camera (the Illum having the big boost of going to 2450 x 1634 or 4 megapixels). Again, the Lytro image has the advantage of being able to be shifted and refocused, but not the sharpness that the Rebel sports.

Different horses for different courses.

Now for something that plays a little differently.

No more need for the Stairmaster at the gym!

This is a good shot. It's solid, colourful, plays with the matrix of lines in the setting, and frankly is just nice. But consider it compared to this.

Very different on every level, pun probably intended. Here, the lighting and planes were just right for the Lytro to do its thing. You get dramatic refocusing comparing the close, close foreground to the trees in the background and even the further parts of the slide stairs. Shifting the point of view has some real parallax going on. Compared to the traditional camera, it's just more lively.

Now for a bit of an unfair comparison the other way.

It's a picture of two kinds of death, right?

Versus.



Both photos have roughly the same crop and the same subject, but they have very different natures. The Rebel shot is sharp all the way through, branches throwing a stark contrast to the steeple in the background while the Lytro -- while really working the refocusing trick in this shot very well -- leaves things a bit softer with a much narrower depth of field.

(This is technically mildly unfair to my own work. The Lytro always shoots at f/2, but in post before exporting to the site, can be set up as high as f/16, pushing everything in the field to full focus. Obviously, that's not what I did here. The overall softness, however, is a big deal here and elsewhere.)

Now let's be really unfair to me in a different way.

Captain America would be damned proud!

Good, crisp, attractive photography. Not how I would have handled the brightness in post, but it captures a certain mood.


Let's be frank: despite being better exposed, this shot is just not as good. I have my suspicions as to why (largely centering on the fact it was on full-auto and that doesn't engage the neutral density filter in bright conditions, which leads anything involving the sky to confuse the living Hell out of the light-field reconstruction), but the lack of crispness does it no favours.

Let's close with some work that, I think, is truly comparable between the two platforms and shows off both their strengths.

Now, I know this one is about death! Right?

And:


Both of these are great shots that make use of the sunset colours to say different things. The Rebel shot is all about silhouette, about colour, and about sharpness all the way. The Lytro shot uses the same colours but pulls that separation between the tree and the steeple out with both the clickable refocusing and the animation applied on mouse-over.

They're both effective photographs, but they are effective in extremely different ways despite pulling from -- literally -- the same image at the same time.

If you've been thinking about exploring the fringes of photographic experimentation and alien technology, congratulations! I've just given you something else to lust after! The first-generation Lytro camera is out there, it's available for purchase at a reasonable price, and even in non-ideal conditions, it'll turn out photography that makes you think about what you're doing in a wholly new way.

Forces you to, really.

If you've been looking for someone to give your Lytro Illum to because it just doesn't fit your workflow, congratulations! I'll be happy to take it off your hands! I'll even give you a few bucks for it, but nowhere near $1,600. Still, you'll be comforted by the knowledge it'll go to a good home with someone who loves it and will treasure it always.

If you're just looking for "a camera," don't care about tinkering with things in post, or don't want to have to utterly rethink the way you compose and shoot pictures, congratulations! I've saved you the hassle of buying a Lytro camera and ending up just sending it to me!

Hold up. Wait. Stop. That's bad for me. Pretend you never saw it.

I've tonnes more experimentation to do with this thing. The macro capabilities alone make it something I'll be using forever. Why, you might ask?

Food reviews!


Ignore the utterly painful colour-tone problem thanks to using straight-up restaurant light and no proper fill. Ignore it altogether. Look at how awesome that close-up texture is! Look how awesome that sweep around and depth is! It's absolutely killer, and that's why this thing is going to go nearly everywhere I do, because food reviews, miniature wargames, essentially any and everything that you'd shoot close-up and with some depth going on will be far more fantastic than a simple flat-scene camera can capture.

If this is the kind of thing you need, this is the kind of thing you need. There is no real replacement for it.

I'm looking forward to tinkering more with this thing. Hopefully, you're interested in seeing more of it, too.

SquidLord, out and engaging!