That’s not to take away from how cool this is, just asking as a practical thing why someone else beside the person in question would buy another lease and do this vs use a digital solution to get a similar effect.
You cannot do with software what you can do with a lens. The information is lost by the time it's in a raw file. Not just depth, but also brightness. Any white highlights are also lost information; a lens can shape a highlight to look different in a way which cannot be done in software without using HDR (i.e. multiple exposures).
https://variety.com/2018/digital/features/light-field-lab-ho...
However those don't seem to be "real real holograms", but rather something closer to the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D like the Nintendo 3DS or some 3D TVs ?
I wonder how they can manage to have a picture cross the frame of the screen, AFAIK this isn't possible neither with "real real holograms" nor stereoscopic 3D ?
(For previous research into "real real holographic video", see these :
https://www.media.mit.edu/spi/holoVideoAll.htm
https://phys.org/news/2010-05-holographic-3d.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/cheap-holographic-video-comi...
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-big-application-d-holography-h... )
The camera lens has a bunch more information to work with in terms of depth. Along the same lines, an iPhone can fake bokeh by applying a filter masked by depth information, but it's not really in the same league as the real optical effect you get from a real lens in the field. (In terms of responsiveness and the quality of detail that's captured.)
OTOH, as much as I think legitimate optical effects can be useful/special at capture time, I have limited use for computational effects at capture time. As long as the 'digital negative' has all the information, I'd much rather be able to apply the computational effect later. (This is an advantage of digital techniques - you can adjust them later.)
1) He is using physical elements to get the interesting shot. There is something that is difficult to describe, but innately alluring about "real" or physical aspects of our increasingly digital world. The bending of light, the crystals in film, the feeling of the pages of a real book. There is something about the medium itself carrying meaning, even if the actual communicated value is the same. Perhaps it speaks to a timelessness, or durability of good ideas, beautiful pictures, and powerful words that can last thousands of years. Where as in the digital realm, my worlds sometimes only last as long as the hard drive they live on. I think it is deeper than that. Physicality is something we can relate to, touch, smell, taste, we experience it far deeper than an abstract concept represented by pixels on a screen.
E.g. Why is a book better than a PDF? I have no good answer.
2) Although being in photography for decades, I was unaware of this specific effect when manipulating the elements inside a lens. I had no idea this effect was possible. The tinkering, the curiosity followed down a path few would bother with, isn't that what hackers are all about? I am inspired by His diving deep on topics of interest.
You could try to approximate a crappier version of it but there would be noticeable differences, and sometimes nuance in art matters.
Definition of je ne sais quoi : something (such as an appealing quality) that cannot be adequately described or expressed.
This sounds like fluff driven by emotion and not reason, but I encourage readers to embrace the lack of reason for some elements of human experience.
We are anything but perfectly rational beings, this is one powerful aspect where efficiency and logic are sacrificed on the alter of subjective experience.
Sometimes it's good to just do things for the experience and nothing more. This is especially true for many hobbies such as Amateur Radio. Guys can armchair quarterback antennas, coax, baluns/ununs, whatever, all day long, arguing about which is right. Then a guy goes out and just tries it, does it all wrong according to the "in" crowd, and has tons of fun. <--- this is me. Doing it because I can and it's fun not because it's "better"
I’ve been using computers and digital graphics applications for about thirty years now.
If I were to get myself a new hobby I wouldn’t necessarily want to have one that made me spend more time in front of a computer. That’s one reason people might want to do things the analog way.
I’m currently reading a book written in 2017 by an author who still uses a typewriter. A good book, and it might help him to avoid distractions when writing.
Practical effects always feel better over computational ones - in terms of feedback.
Which is weird to say because it only really happened for me after digital cameras gave instant previews with zoom & I could tweak/click while getting to know some new hardware.
I did some digital tilt-shifts and then played around with a manual shifted lens once - seeing what you click is so "tactile" (& the bar for it will shift was more computation can be done in preview).
The thing is that the digital thing is still guessing depth with some gradient map, particularly at such a long focal length.
The reason a lot of the in-app portrait modes have improved massively is because there are secondary depth sensors which fill in the data that is needed to compute a good looking depth map.
> why someone else beside the person in question would buy another lease
I can't think of a single reason except to mess with things till you get the photo you want :)
I wasted a bunch of time with a very cheap (but great) Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D for different bokehs during a party shoot, which turned out to be a fun project "makeable" for a tutorial I was doing later.
And eventually turned to a lensbaby bokeh punchable + a lot of vinyl clips of random shapes (mostly Om/ॐ shapes for temple pictures).
I'm sure I could get a digital solution for that, but it involved a lot less work to punch a pattern and go nuts with it.
It's fun to fiddle and tinker. As much as someone could make the image in a render (I actually seriously doubt the picture could be recreated with post-processing alone unless there was a light field camera involved or something) who would think to do so? This didn't come about because someone was looking for the effect, but because someone was exploring and found it.
Such filters live in 2D, optics in 3D - part of why most filter for things like "bokeh" don't work particularly well is that without an accurate depth map you are guessing or ignoring that 3rd dimension.
On the flip side - this stuff is aesthetic, so there isn't one "proper" way to do it.
People like to play. People like to place artificial constraints upon their work, and then see what they can make within those constraints.
People get very used to a particular camera and lens, and sometimes they get a bit stuck in a rut and want to break away from that.
People sometimes like unpredictability, and it can lead them onto different ways of working or different ways to present a result.
With computational capabilities these days, you can really get whatever look like purely through software.
We can have both. The world is not boolean.
I too am an amateur/prosumer photographer who uses an entirely digital process. But tech has its weaknesses, especially in photography -- digital tech still can't replicate a lot of what analog can do, and its important to embrace that.
That $4000 mirrorless still can't replicate the dynamic range of 35mm film. Photoshop still can't replicate the contrasty reds of Velvia film. And so on...
“Es gibt kein Kompromiss / Es zählt nur ja und nein / Wir sehn wies wirklich ist / Wir denken digital”
A good deal do photo filters are based on real world optics. Sometimes optics that are outdated (Polaroid mode), sometimes because the physical setup is really expensive. What I am asking is whether this particular effect is hard to replicate. I feel like I’ve seen it before in digital art but don’t know if it’s the same or not and whether the physical effect is actually somehow magical or not.
If there is an equivalent way to achieve the effect digitally, for many people that is good information and they can do that, and don't need to go to the lengths this guy did.