Computational Photography: The next steps in photography could blur reality

When a celebrity appears in a fan-magazine photo, there's no telling whether the person ever wore the clothes depicted or visited that locale.

In one new aspect of computational photography, a dome contains hundreds of precisely positioned flash units. A high-speed camera captures a frame as each flash fires in sequence. Computers can then relight the scene as they reconstruct it. But today's image processing is just a prelude. Imagine photographs in which the lighting in the room, the position of the camera, the point of focus, and even the expressions on people's faces were all chosen after the picture was taken. The moment that the picture beautifully captures never actually happened. Welcome to the world of computational photography, arguably the biggest step in photography since the move away from film.

Digital photography replaced the film in traditional cameras with a tiny wafer of silicon. While that switch swapped the darkroom for far more-powerful image-enhancement software, the camera itself changed little. Its aperture, shutter, flash, and other components remained essentially the same.

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