Lytro the camera you can focus after taking the picture

Last night in our Portrait class a student was concerned that using his 85mm f1.2 meant he sometimes focussed in the wrong place, I suggested that f1.2 might be just too shallow for a portrait photograph that captures a face and this started a discussion as to where one should focus. I maintained that the eyes are the most important in a portrait but, rightly, others said sometimes there are other aspects of a face, or in fact the portrait,  that one might want to highlight. I said there is now a camera that you can focus after having taken the picture. This brought amazement and scepticism. The sceptical aspects were surely a photographer should know where they want to focus before pressing the shutter, personally I agree with this thought, and that how can a camera do this. I promised to find information on this. I have posted on the Lytro before here and here but this time I found a new article,  that explains how the Lytro is going to allow manual settings, seems weird when everything else is automatic, but what is really interesting on this site is that it allows you to re-focus images on the site itself so you can see how the process works. Go and have a play.

Do I care about this stuff, no not one bit, this is not photography as I have known it for decades, the making of decisions at the point of capture is fundamental to me but then I am old, how about you, not are you old, but what do you think about the making of images. Can everything be Instagramed to make it interesting afterwards, perhaps I should put interesting in quote marks. If I see another ‘creative’ filter applied to a crap picture to make it ‘interesting’ I might explode, now that would be worth photographing