Lytro Camera, Jello, and Christmas Ornaments

Now if you don't know what the Lytro light field camera is by now, then you have been living under a rock. It is basically a camera that allows you to change the focus point later in post process. Something that many photographers would like to do. When you begin to digest the coolness of what I said, you quickly determine that this is a wanted item on your next camera.

There is just one problem with that. It only comes on this camera, the camera is... well... unattractive, and the images are not very sharp. Oh... And did I mention this thing is expensive? $499 for what amounts to a funny shaped point and shoot camera.

However, Lytro is still living, and is expanding  in the market. They increased their US distribution, and htey are now even selling in China.

They even just recently did a firmware release that allows the block like camera to have manual controls.

Well photographer Alan Sailer used those manual controls to see what he could accomplish. In manual mode, the shutter speed range is only 8 seconds to 1/250th of a second. Not very fast, to be sure.

But Alan used some careful timing with a manually fired flash - meaning the flash was not triggered of connected to the camera in any way - to pull off som very cool shots with christmas ornaments filled with color Jello. He fired a pellet through them, and with the aid of that flash, got some pretty interesting shots. One of them is shown below.

Click around the photos to see how the focal point changes.

Here is the website.