lagoon dreams week #5
Morning at Chatham Bay, Cocos Island, Costa Rica
Canon EOS 350D + Canon EF-S 10-22mm, Circular PL
this image is not cropped and not color corrected
Location on Google Maps
Wikipedia reference
Early morning in the Chatham Bay of Cocos Island, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. Cocos Island is known as best shark sanctuary in the world. At the same time it was prototype of the Jurrasic Park island from the book and the movie of same name. Also it is believed that it is resting place for Treasure of Lima, one of the most sought after treasures in the world lost long time ago. Imagine how much stuff is concentrated in this magnetic piece of land located 45 hours of sailing away from mainland Costa Rica !
Small island on the right is Isla Manuelita, majestic diving spot, home to the signature night dive with hundreds of whitetip sharks - one of the most impressive experiences I ever had in my life. I really dream about next trip to Cocos Island, which I hope will happen soon.
Last week was rich on the news in the world of technology and photography. Two great gadgets were announced. First one is Galaxy Nexus phone running new version of Android - 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich. Check this great ad video to see how advanced Android is becoming very quickly. Benefiting from it's openness and freedom of multiple form-factors, better and easier development tools - I don't think iPhone will survive this competition in long term by keeping it's current market share. Android evolution is accelerating in incredible pace, and I'm looking forward to get my hands on this amazing new phone in just few weeks. Go, Android ! :-)
But biggest news hitting world of technology and photography came from Lytro. This small start-up company revealed revolutionary technology which probably will be biggest advance in the world of photo after moving from film to digital format.
Click on the following link to see that it is about - https://www.lytro.com/living-pictures/283.
Lytro developed first consumer light-field camera. Light-field camera captures not only color and intensity of light with it's sensor, but also angle at which ray hits sensor. Using super-sophisticated software they transform angle and magnitude data into the depth of field data. Resulting capture gives enough information for post-processing software to refocus image at any distance after it was taken. Well actually having so much data has a lot of implications - imagine yourself post processing with filters and masks operating on depth data. This has mind boggling number of interesting opportunities. Of course this is just first iteration of Lytro hardware, and it is relatively simple - creators say that in megapixel terms it is close to 1080p HD quality resolution. I think it is not big problem since majority of photos are viewed on computer screens these days anyway, and technology evolves very quickly - just remember how primitive first digital cameras were and where we are now.
Lytro was invented by Dr. Ren Ng, Stanford Ph.D., whom spent 8 years with his team fitting technology which originally required array of cameras and super computer attached into something you can hold in your hand. His Ph.D. thesis on underlying science is available publically - http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf. Amazing reading I must say - you will appreciate amount of research and technology which went into this project. I ordered my Lytro and I can't wait to put my hands on capture file format to see what I can try to do with this data. Must be amazingly interesting ! And of course I hope I will be able to take it underwater sometime too - must be possible considering that Eric Cheng, one of the world famous underwater photographers is part of Lytro crew too !
This is my last post in "lagoon dreams week". Next week will be dedicated to manta rays - and image format in my blog is changing to 1150pixels, as trend set by Google+ community dictates - we are advancing into the future with higher resolutions of web content ! :-) Meanwhile don't forget to check my G+ - https://plus.google.com/111095045247360522931/ - I'm writing a lot there these days, not just posting photos but also touching some sensitive and controversial subjects too, which, as usual, pisses off a lot of people :-) !