What’s the News: Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, has designed a camera that lets you shoot first and focus later. The camera captures the far more light and data than traditional models, and comes with software that lets you focus the photo, shift perspective, or go 3D after you’ve taken the photo. The company plans to sell a consumer, fits-in-your-pocket model by the end of the year.

How the Heck:

Lytro’s camera captures the light field, all the light traveling every direction through every point in a scene. Light-field cameras records data—such as direction, color, and intensity—about each individual ray of light. (Typical digital cameras, on the other hand, also take in information on color, instensity, and—to some extent—direction, but they essentially sum up light in a scene and record the total rather than tallying the information for each ray of light.) To do this, the camera has an array of microlenses behind the main lens, which help break up the light coming in into its component rays.
As Lytro CEO Ren Ng told the Wall Street Journal, it’s akin to recording each musician in a band on a different track and mixing the tracks later, rather than recording ...