How badly will Lytro damage photography as a career?

[appleciders]

@Algher

I want one of these just for sports shots. I miss the focal point regularly when shooting my kids playing sports, and the ability to later focus on certain players would be great.

Sports photography is about the only example I can think of where this would be very useful on a professional level. In most other instances, it’s pretty easy to focus correctly, even if you’re using manual focus. But in sports, where professionals are probably using some pretty damn fast lenses at great distances, it could be fairly useful.

[Otara]

Even there high frame rates are often as important as focus. If it needs to do more data per picture, you’re getting better focus at the expense of frame rate.

Otara

[appleciders]

@Otara

Even there high frame rates are often as important as focus. If it needs to do more data per picture, you’re getting better focus at the expense of frame rate.

Otara

Also true. Likewise, the larger file size will limit how many shots you can fit on a memory card, which will limit how many shots you can take.
Also, back to the OP: Really? This is bigger than the shift to digital? Being able to not need to focus is bigger than the ability to take dozens or hundreds of times more shots at a processing cost of practically nothing? No way. The shift to digital is a much, much greater change than this.

[BrotherCadfael]

@Joey_P

You can take your shitty camera that takes crappy pictures and hand it to Annie Liebowitz or Ansel Adams* and they’ll take fantastic pictures.

Annie Liebowitz could probably do some decent work with a crappy point-and-shoot, but I somehow doubt that Ansel Adams would be able to do so.

What with his being dead and all…

[Argent_Towers]

@beowulff

I hate to break it to you, but digital photography has already killed (or at least severely injured) Photography as a career!
I have a number of friends who are professional photographers, and all of them are finding it increasingly difficult to get work. First of all, the small clients who might need a couple of custom photos for a brochure are either going to Google search and stealing them, or taking the photos themselves. Secondly, the big clients who need a professional do large photoshoots now have a huge pool of hungry photographers, who are willing to undercut each other on price.

I think that’s more the fault of the shitty economy than the availability of digital photography.