Photography has been in a constant state of evolution since its inception dating back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. At times it burst into an all out revolution like the means to fix a silver process image, method of reproducing colors, and capturing images digitally. Designzzz.com has created a nice “infographic” of the ongoing evolution. They do a nice job of capturing details up to 1991, but then jump to the giga pixel camera in 2011.  Don’t get me wrong I think they have done a bang up job, but I believe we are on the verge of a Photography Revolution as big if not bigger the the invention of the Camera Obscura.

In 2010 Pingdom posted numbers as of 2009 as follows:

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

 

Photography as an industry has seen incredible growth over the past decade or so. We all know with the advent of smart phones and tablets this continues to grow exponentially. Like the mobile explosion I feel there is one recent advancement that I feel is truly revolution vs evolutional. Lytro’s Light Field Camera. Their tag line is “Picture Revolution”.

This is truly cutting edge technology and a renewed approach to capturing digital images. While there is much debate on the practicality or value to professional photography Ren Ng’s dissertation on Light field technology is impressive. Their marketing approach seems to be targeting the point and shoot community with its features including Focus Later, No Shutter Lag, 2D or 3D imaging, Low Light Sensitivity, and portability.

This seems like an appropriate fit; however, I wonder if the technology will work for more creative applications. For example  in the gallery I did not see one black and white or HDR image. It seems there is unprecedented control in the post processing of focus, but I wonder is this is at a cost to other post processing controls.

Regardless I think Mr. Ng sums it up nicely in the conclusion of his dissertation…

” This is a very exciting time to be working in digital imaging. We have two powerful evolutionary forces acting: an overabundance of resolution, and processing power in close proximity. I hope I have convinced you that cameras as we know them today are just an evolutionary step in where we are going, and I feel that we are on the verge of an explosion in new kinds of cameras and computational imaging. ”

 

 

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