Lytro

A really great friend recently turned me on to this 16gb Lytro light view camera. F2 all the time. 8X optical zoom. The light view camera reads the entire light field instead of a single focal plane. The picture saves to what is called a living picture file. You can sharpen any point of light in the image capture, leading to a lot of different possibilities manipulating depth of field. You can continue to refocus perpetually.

As a point of example I focus here on both the flower and the motorcycle on the same shot. Not a great shot but sufficient for purposes of illustration. I have just started to mess around with this thing. I think that it will be pretty cool.

Lytro, Inc. is a light field camera startup company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng, a light-field photography researcher at Stanford University. Light field photography (also known as plenoptic photography) captures all the available light in a scene going in every direction. It works by breaking up the main image with an array of microlenses over an image sensor. The camera software then uses this data to determine the directions of incoming light rays.