focus

Clever Hack for Shooting Lytro-Style DoF-Changeable Photos Using a DSLR

Lytro's groundbreaking consumer light-field camera made a splash in the camera industry this year by making it possible to refocus photographs after they're shot. However, the cheapest model for the boxy device has a price tag of $399, and the reviews have been mixed so far.

If you'd like to play around with your own refocus-able photographs without having to buy an actual Lytro device, you can actually fake it using a standard DSLR camera (or any camera with manual focusing and a large-aperture lens).

Focus Peaking Making Its Way onto More Digital Cameras

One of the interesting technologies Sony introduced into its line of NEX mirrorless cameras last year (starting with the NEX-C3) was "focus peaking", a feature from the video recording world that highlights in-focus areas of an image to aid in manual focusing. You know those colorful pixels that image editing programs use to indicate blown out or underexposed areas of photos? It's like that, except for focus. What's awesome is that you can adjust things like focus, focal length, and aperture, and then see the depth of field adjust on your screen in real time. Check out the 10-second video above for a demo.

More Ways to View Lytro Photos with Google Chrome Extensions

Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures -- interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point -- easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions.

Jumping Spiders’ Eyes May Inspire New Camera Technologies

In a paper published in Science this week, Japanese researchers reported on a discovery that jumping spiders use a method for gauging distance called "image defocus", which no other living organism is known to use. Rather than use focusing and stereoscopic vision like humans or head-wobbling motion parallax like birds, the spiders have two green-detecting layers in their eyes -- one in focus and one not. By comparing the two, the spiders can determine the distance from objects. Scientists discovered that bathing spiders in pure red light "breaks" their distance measuring ability.

What it Looks Like to Focus a Rangefinder Camera

If you've never used a rangefinder camera before, this video provides a visual look at how focusing works (a Leica M2 is used). Basically you're given a second (smaller) image of the scene, and your goal is turn the focus ring until the two images match up for the subject you'd like to have in focus.

Future Photographers May Adjust Focus During Post Processing

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.