How many times have you whipped out your camera to capture a moment only to find the camera has picked the wrong thing in the picture to focus on and you end up having a blurry picture you either toss or live with in it's imperfection? Well not anymore.

A company called Lytro has developed a new camera sensor, which they call a light field sensor, which removes the need to focus. So those of your with a bit of camera nous may ask "How does a light field camera capture the light rays?" Well let Lytro answer that question...

Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.

The camera then uses powerful software instead of the many internal parts of regular cameras to process your image. This then give you the ability to adjust you photo at a later date without any loss of quality and to suit your needs.

So for example, imagine you're on your jolly hollies and spot a beautiful mountain lake. Whip out your camera, take a shot and carry on your way. You get home, load the picture on your computer and you get this...

Blurry Background

Lovely, had I wanted to take a photo of super sharp weeds. With this camera, apparently you can correct this by effectively selecting a new focal point and the image refocuses onto that point. So with a simple click, you get your desired shot...

Blurry Foreground

If this works as well as they say it will, and as well as their gallery of "living photos" gives you the impression it will, I think this technology really will change the way your average Joe Schmoe takes photos.

The two photos above were taken from their gallery... I just selected two different focal points.

I'm eager to see what the camera looks like and read the first reviews to see if it really lives up to the hype.