4 ms·

Remember the Lytro Camera? Their products allowed you to change focus in post as well, but with a different technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_fiel

Remember the Lytro Camera? Their products allowed you to change focus in post as well, but with a different technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro https://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/Howitworks/how-it-works-lytro-camera.html https://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/Howitworks/how-it-wor... https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=rklGn6Ml7U0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=rklGn6Ml7U0

PaulHoule 3y ago
I have a Lytro Illium, I was hoping I could make stereograms with it but so far it is a bust. I’ve done a little street photography with it and also took one picture of a bed of Rudbeckia flowers that I refocused that I thought was a keeper https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111122486655042312 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111122486655042312 which is similar to but different than what I shot with my Sony with a cheap 50mm/0.95 lens from 7Artisans https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111061017008323474 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111061017008323474 the depth fields I get out of it are completely unusable so it is looking like a white elephant but I might try what I can do with open source software because people have reverse engineeres the file format. (Though I have burned out of stereograms for a while and I’m now figuring how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. If I was thinking about anything else in photography it would be focus stacking because who wants artificially blurry photos when you can get super tack sharp?)
- bentcorner 3y ago
  > Sony with a cheap 50mm/0.95 lens from 7Artisans OT but I have their 35mm f0.95 and the bang for your buck from these lenses is pretty amazing.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    You bet, many of the most interesting brands in photography now are Chinese companies like 7Artisans and Kandao. 7Artisans makes lenses that are manual focus and lack anti-shake (though my camera can provide anti-shake for them if I enter the focal length manually). You can find a $7000 Japanese lens that has all the bells and whistles and better optical quality than a 7Artisans $180 lens, but I had just had to get one when I saw a photo gallery that had me thinking (1) I’ve never seen a photo like that before and (2) I can easily afford that and I couldn’t say anything like that about a G Master lens. (Though Volleyball did teach me you have to pay to play.). Here is another example of a nice 7Artisans shot https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997 that shows how it laughs at low light conditions.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  I think you might be able to use Stable Diffusion with the Depth ControlNet to take your exported image and convert it into a depth map that could then be fed into a stereogram app.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    To do that there is the problem that there are some pixels the left eye sees that the right eye sees and vice versa. Probably you can get an A.I. to fill those pixels but you absolutely have to do it. I think some of the appeal of a good stereogram isn't just that it has the illusion of depth but that it literally has more information than a flat photo because of this, I think it affects emotional scenes in movies since you get to see another 5-10% of the muscles around the edge of the face. Personally I'm more interested in trying to pick out light rays that arrived on the left vs the right side of the camera (synthesize two apertures as opposed to synthesize a narrower or wider aperture)
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      Ive never seen a stereogram where I can see the emotion in someone's face, that sounds amazing. I used to use a xbox kinect to produce depth data for my stereograms in my younger days, but I could never get fine detail. Do you happen to have a url handy of some top level stereograms?
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    That's not Stable Diffusion though, it's a different third-party model. (MiDaS, for example, but there are many of those) Generally, good depth maps is a holy grail of imaging, but the issue is that it's very sensitive to resolution and correctness, so it must be perfect and have better resolution than the picture to achieve good results. ML-powered depth estimation isn't there yet.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  You can make stereograms with your Lytro, but you're limited to center to center distances less than the diameter of the lens. I was surprised when the Lytro came out and it was so tiny. To be properly useful, it needed about a 10" diameter outer lens. There are ways to take multiple conventional exposures from the same plane, and generate a virtual focal plane after the fact. I've been manually doing that (using Hugin and a python script) since I heard (in 2008) of Marc Levoy's experiments at Stanford.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I’d be happy with something that can makes pairs with less separation than my Kandao Qoocam Ego. My main problem is that I am getting absolutely flat images out of Lytro Desktop though the camera is showing a lot of depth data when I am taking the picture.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  >...how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. How/ why? I can only imagine size of game-playing area..
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    (1) It is played indoors, there is not a lot of light. The environment can be visually cluttered. To make matters worse, at my Uni the arena (where they also play basketball) has bright LED video signs that cause the scene to be backlit. (The college on the other hill though has a much better arena from my point of view, I can even sit on the floor in front of the bleachers which is a great angle though I know if I do it long enough I'll get hit by the ball.) Some consequences are: high ISO shooting with a lot of noise which means you can’t shoot wide and crop it without noise being terrible (maybe you have two players in the frame), Open aperture means your focus has to be precise but it can be a challenging environment for autofocus. I have a 90mm which takes lovely pictures and does pretty good in low light but when the autofocus resets it takes two seconds and I certainly can’t focus faster than that myself. You will be using a prime lens instead of a zoom lens because of the low light which means you can’t just set the focal length to what is convenient for you. (2) In soccer or field hockey you can just follow the ball and shoot bursts and get some dramatic shots. A player might be dribbling for several seconds. American football is a little tougher because of the stop and start nature: a good shot of a passing play means anticipating and planning ahead. In volleyball though contact with the ball is so quick that you can’t at all see something and shoot it, you have to be set up ahead of time, be focused ahead of time (I used the auto focus lock for the first time), be looking at the viewfinder and looking at the ball at the same time, etc. Fortunately the action is a volleyball game is highly structured, the players are work together in a certain way so if you stick to a player you will actually take the same shot over and over. I’ve challenged myself to shoot a game of every sport my Uni has a varsity team of and so far volleyball is the first one where I walked away from a game without any good shots, I went and asked at dpreview for help and went back and got much better results.
gumby 3y ago
I have been surprised this didn’t become a feature of phone cameras. Apple announced something similar a couple of weeks ago, but it’s not the full light field.
hyperific 3y ago
If you have one of the early Lytros there are some pretty nifty firmware hacks available for them as of January this year https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of-an-unusual-camera/ https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of...

PaulHoule 3y ago

I have a Lytro Illium, I was hoping I could make stereograms with it but so far it is a bust. I’ve done a little street photography with it and also took one picture of a bed of Rudbeckia flowers that I refocused that I thought was a keeper https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111122486655042312 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111122486655042312 which is similar to but different than what I shot with my Sony with a cheap 50mm/0.95 lens from 7Artisans https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111061017008323474 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111061017008323474 the depth fields I get out of it are completely unusable so it is looking like a white elephant but I might try what I can do with open source software because people have reverse engineeres the file format. (Though I have burned out of stereograms for a while and I’m now figuring how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. If I was thinking about anything else in photography it would be focus stacking because who wants artificially blurry photos when you can get super tack sharp?)

bentcorner 3y ago
> Sony with a cheap 50mm/0.95 lens from 7Artisans OT but I have their 35mm f0.95 and the bang for your buck from these lenses is pretty amazing.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  You bet, many of the most interesting brands in photography now are Chinese companies like 7Artisans and Kandao. 7Artisans makes lenses that are manual focus and lack anti-shake (though my camera can provide anti-shake for them if I enter the focal length manually). You can find a $7000 Japanese lens that has all the bells and whistles and better optical quality than a 7Artisans $180 lens, but I had just had to get one when I saw a photo gallery that had me thinking (1) I’ve never seen a photo like that before and (2) I can easily afford that and I couldn’t say anything like that about a G Master lens. (Though Volleyball did teach me you have to pay to play.). Here is another example of a nice 7Artisans shot https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997 that shows how it laughs at low light conditions.
nickthegreek 3y ago
I think you might be able to use Stable Diffusion with the Depth ControlNet to take your exported image and convert it into a depth map that could then be fed into a stereogram app.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  To do that there is the problem that there are some pixels the left eye sees that the right eye sees and vice versa. Probably you can get an A.I. to fill those pixels but you absolutely have to do it. I think some of the appeal of a good stereogram isn't just that it has the illusion of depth but that it literally has more information than a flat photo because of this, I think it affects emotional scenes in movies since you get to see another 5-10% of the muscles around the edge of the face. Personally I'm more interested in trying to pick out light rays that arrived on the left vs the right side of the camera (synthesize two apertures as opposed to synthesize a narrower or wider aperture)
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Ive never seen a stereogram where I can see the emotion in someone's face, that sounds amazing. I used to use a xbox kinect to produce depth data for my stereograms in my younger days, but I could never get fine detail. Do you happen to have a url handy of some top level stereograms?
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  That's not Stable Diffusion though, it's a different third-party model. (MiDaS, for example, but there are many of those) Generally, good depth maps is a holy grail of imaging, but the issue is that it's very sensitive to resolution and correctness, so it must be perfect and have better resolution than the picture to achieve good results. ML-powered depth estimation isn't there yet.
mikewarot 3y ago
You can make stereograms with your Lytro, but you're limited to center to center distances less than the diameter of the lens. I was surprised when the Lytro came out and it was so tiny. To be properly useful, it needed about a 10" diameter outer lens. There are ways to take multiple conventional exposures from the same plane, and generate a virtual focal plane after the fact. I've been manually doing that (using Hugin and a python script) since I heard (in 2008) of Marc Levoy's experiments at Stanford.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I’d be happy with something that can makes pairs with less separation than my Kandao Qoocam Ego. My main problem is that I am getting absolutely flat images out of Lytro Desktop though the camera is showing a lot of depth data when I am taking the picture.
Ylpertnodi 3y ago
>...how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. How/ why? I can only imagine size of game-playing area..
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  (1) It is played indoors, there is not a lot of light. The environment can be visually cluttered. To make matters worse, at my Uni the arena (where they also play basketball) has bright LED video signs that cause the scene to be backlit. (The college on the other hill though has a much better arena from my point of view, I can even sit on the floor in front of the bleachers which is a great angle though I know if I do it long enough I'll get hit by the ball.) Some consequences are: high ISO shooting with a lot of noise which means you can’t shoot wide and crop it without noise being terrible (maybe you have two players in the frame), Open aperture means your focus has to be precise but it can be a challenging environment for autofocus. I have a 90mm which takes lovely pictures and does pretty good in low light but when the autofocus resets it takes two seconds and I certainly can’t focus faster than that myself. You will be using a prime lens instead of a zoom lens because of the low light which means you can’t just set the focal length to what is convenient for you. (2) In soccer or field hockey you can just follow the ball and shoot bursts and get some dramatic shots. A player might be dribbling for several seconds. American football is a little tougher because of the stop and start nature: a good shot of a passing play means anticipating and planning ahead. In volleyball though contact with the ball is so quick that you can’t at all see something and shoot it, you have to be set up ahead of time, be focused ahead of time (I used the auto focus lock for the first time), be looking at the viewfinder and looking at the ball at the same time, etc. Fortunately the action is a volleyball game is highly structured, the players are work together in a certain way so if you stick to a player you will actually take the same shot over and over. I’ve challenged myself to shoot a game of every sport my Uni has a varsity team of and so far volleyball is the first one where I walked away from a game without any good shots, I went and asked at dpreview for help and went back and got much better results.

gumby 3y ago

I have been surprised this didn’t become a feature of phone cameras. Apple announced something similar a couple of weeks ago, but it’s not the full light field.

hyperific 3y ago

If you have one of the early Lytros there are some pretty nifty firmware hacks available for them as of January this year https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of-an-unusual-camera/ https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/unlocking-hidden-features-of...