A tube the size of a small can of Red Bull is supposedly the future of photography. So we used it to take lots of pictures of puppies.
You might've heard something about Lytro, often hailed as "a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s" or that'll at least change the way "you take pictures forever."
What's so special about it? Well, it's a little different from a regular camera. It's a light field, or plenoptic, camera. When you shoot, it isn't just capturing light on two-dimensional plane (namely, the color and intensity of it) like a normal camera — it's also capturing the direction light is moving in, using hundreds of micro lenses, so it's able to reconstruct an entire scene. What that means, practically, is that you can do things like adjust focus in a photo after you've taken it, rendering any section of the photo in sharp focus — foreground, background, middleground, wherever. It's pretty cool.
Other people have done full, thorough reviews of the Lytro. But there's really only one question that you care about: How good is it for taking pictures of puppies??? Here's your answer. (Click on any point in the photo to refocus it, double click to zoom.)
This is kind of like the signature Lytro shot: Something very close in the foreground (click to focus on the dog) and then something in the background (now click on the bench), where you can jump back and forth between two different focal planes.
