Camera Innovation

For a long time the advancement of photographic art was intimately tied to developments in the underlying technology of capturing an image. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore, with most effort going into digitally replicating the analog (film) photo experience. Then along come a couple of new developments in camera technology that appear to actually add someting new.

The first is the light field or plenoptic camera. A honeycomb of tiny lenses is placed in front of a digital camera's aperture. The light from each lens is recorded in such a way as to be able to reconstruct where its charateristics at a range of focusing distances and in doing so allow for the digital recontruction of varying depths of field. I've read a couple of sites' explanation of how this works, but I took Physics for English Majors and it just doesn't click with me. But I saw the sample images and I can't wait to see this trickle into commercially available cameras. I would assume high end medium format first, then DSLRs in about 5-7 years. But that's just an uneducated guess.

The second is Clifford Ross' 9"x18" view camera. Ross's homemade camera harkens back to the days when painters crushed and mixed their own paint ingredients. The camera has been dubbed the "gigapixel camera", but there is nothing digital about the camera itself. (Ross does scan in the resulting images for enlargement). The thing is said to pick out individual roof shingles at 4000 feet. An interview with Clifford Ross about the camera (scroll down.)