Is technology replacing skill?

By CBC News

There's a new camera on the market that allows you to "shoot now, focus later."

Lytro's light field camera, which debuted Tuesday, captures an entire light field with one click.

A light field represents "the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space," the company explained. "Conventional cameras cannot record the light field."

So what about adjusting focal length, aperture, shutter speed and ISO (

They're a thing of the past, Lytro says.

Algorithms allow the photographer to focus on any point he or she wishes, PC Magazine reported.

"When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus," Lytro CEO Ren Ng told the magazine. "So if we have the whole light field, what we can do what that physical lens would normally have done, but in computation."

Would you buy Lytro's camera? Or do you think that technology is replacing skill?


(This survey is not scientific. Results are based on readers' responses.)