The Lytro Camera

I receive some of the ‘Daily Candy’ email newsletters. One of them is the ‘Weekend Guide’ which includes some online finds. They typically have some cool things to check out, sometimes not but they always have something of interest. Thursday’s guide highlighted a little camera that looked pretty cool and then I checked out their blog and it became really cool.

I have to say that for the first time I wished I was a blogger with a huge following that had companies asking me to try out their products so that I could review them online. I would totally want to have one of these little cameras! Why you might ask? Is it because it’s a cool shape and comes in three colors? Not really, although the design does appeal to my love of things being different and compact. Because it reminds me of one of those peek-a-boo viewfinders that I used to love as a child? No, but that feeling of nostalgia is there which might play a little bit into my desire. The real reason? If you go to their blog HERE you’ll be able to see for yourself. I’m linking you directly to one of their posts because it illustrates this cool feature. Because of how the camera captures the entire light field of whatever you’re shooting, you can focus on any particular part of the image…after it’s taken! Right on the camera, online or on your desktop. Seriously!

I have to admit, in case any of you do the same thing I did, but I’m sure you’re much smarter than I am and wouldn’t, when I went to the “picture gallery” page on their website I wasn’t that impressed. There were a bunch of photos that I was scrolling through, some were interesting shots but a lot of them weren’t. I thought to myself, ‘oh, they must just let people upload their images and some are cool and most aren’t.’ And then, after seeing the blog I went back to that gallery and realized what I missed the first time. Just like on the blog, you can click on any part of the photo and pull it into focus. All of a sudden all of the images became interesting because I could see them the way I would want to see them. By pulling whatever part of the photo into focus I wanted. SO COOL.

If you’re someone who wants to know how the technology works you can go HERE to the Lytro “science inside” page and take a look for yourself. I think having them explain it is probably much smarter than me trying to muddle through the explanation. And besides, I’m not the big blogger that I would like to be for this post so I’m not reviewing the camera because I don’t even have one.

But, I think I can safely say, I would love to try it out for myself!