For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera.
Unlike regular digital or film cameras, which can only record a scene in two dimensions, light field cameras capture all of the light rays traveling in every direction through a scene. This means that some aspects of a picture can be manipulated after the fact.
I started taking pictures when I was around 10, so I have been inadvertently been training my eye for it for years. Traveling gave me a ton of practice as well, and the ability, once you learn to properly manipulate and capture light and freeze any moment in time for safe keeping, has always fascinated me.
Photography has always been about capturing light.
A living tree is a changing, sleeve shape, a wet, thin, bright green creature that survives in the thin layer between heartwood and bark. It stands waiting for light, which it catches in the close-woven sieves of its leaves.
Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.
Marvelous,” she said. “Tell me about this tapestry.” Arachne’s lips curled over her mandibles. “Why do you care? You're about to die.” “Well, yes,” Annabeth said. “But the way you captured the light is amazing. Did you use real gold thread for the sunbeams?
If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact.
I've decided that what interests me most is that you can only capture the light at a certain time. But after that, five minutes after that, then it's a different thing. So if you don't have the right aperture, you've missed it. Of course, you can correct it in the lab. But not really.