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The shutter fires and your camera’s digital image sensor is hit by photon particles, creating a two-dimensional photograph; this process is one that photographers are familiar with in their day to day work. However, when Lytro introduced the first commercially available light field camera, the game was changed with a sensor that could capture more than before - aperture and focus became adjustable in post-production, and an interactive perspective became possible.

A patent filed back in September of 2011 was finally awarded to Apple today, and it has the whole photo world atwitter. That's because this patent describes a camera system that would use the light-field technology made famous by Lytro to take refocusable images -- and it could work inside portable devices such as an iPhone.

That's right, light-field technology in an iPhone... now you see why everybody is excited over something that is, after all, still just a patent.

Ever since Lytro caused a stir by releasing the world's first consumer light field camera almost two years ago, the company has been somewhat quiet. With the exception of a few updates in November of last year and an iOS app released a couple of months ago, most of the stories we've covered with "Lytro" in the title had to do with competitors working on Lytro-like features. All of that is about to change, however, in 2014.

If you're at all familiar with Lytro cameras and their light field technology, you'll have heard of founder and CEO Ren Ng. However, he won't be holding the title of CEO much longer. Two days ago Ng announced via blog post that he would be stepping aside as the CEO of Lytro and moving into the Executive Chairman position previously occupied by Charles Chi (who, incidentally, is now the interim CEO).

Here’s a talk that Lytro founder Ren Ng gave at …

In November of last year, Steve Jobs' official biographer Walter Isaacson revealed that Jobs had wanted to reinvent three things: television, textbooks, and photography. Last week Apple announced that it was reinventing textbooks with iBooks 2, which is intended to start a digital textbook revolution. The company is also rumored to be working on a Siri-enabled TV. Now, hints about what Steve Jobs wanted to do with photography are starting to emerge, and the murmuring is centered around one company: Lytro.

Camera startup Lytro made a splash back in June when it announced that it was working on a revolutionary new light-field camera geared towards consumers. Rather than capture traditional 2D images, the new camera will record information about the scene's light field, allowing photographers to do things such as refocus a shot after it is made or display any photo in 3D. The camera is scheduled to be announced within the next few months.