It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.
Ren Ng
I am a very keen photographer. I have enjoyed taking pictures since I was a kid with my family, but I became more serious about it at university.
I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.
The first light-field camera array I saw at Stanford had a bunch of applications, like to do special effects like you see in 'The Matrix,' where you spin the camera around in frozen motion. It took up an entire room.
I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom.
We have seen amazing, creative and interactive pictures from camera owners, and I'm looking forward to the Lytro camera being available in Australia.
There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
On the personal side, I was rock climbing and taking pictures with my friends. We took all sorts of portrait and action pictures, and I was thinking at the time that these are inherently difficult to focus correctly.
Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.
There's something about light field photography that's just magical.
Unlike regular digital or film cameras, which can only record a scene in two dimensions, light field cameras capture all of the light rays traveling in every direction through a scene. This means that some aspects of a picture can be manipulated after the fact.
Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together.
With Illum, we're able to start to customize that supply chain in a very deep way... to rethink the entire imaging pipeline.
I just love taking pictures.
For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera.
The merging of science and art is at the core of what we do.
Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.
With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
Light-field photography is a transformational technology that needs a transformational product to introduce it. For the first time, we have a light-field camera that's going to be for everyone - not something in a huge room in a research facility.
If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact.
Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.
The reason we know as human beings that pictures have to be focused before you take the shot is because we know if we're not focusing our eyes on something that happens, then it's too late - you can't go searching in your memory to find it because that light never struck your mind.
The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.
I was reluctant to start the company that would become Lytro, primarily due to my academic background.
Catching the right fleeting moment, with the right focus, is a very difficult thing to do.
When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus.
Yes, we are a producer of cameras, but we understand that at the end of the day, you have to make photos in software. A lot of companies focus on the camera side, and a lot are on the software side. There's a chasm between the two.
I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.
Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.
DSLRs take beautiful pictures, but they are hard to focus.
Basically, with a regular camera, you have to take time or allow the camera to focus before you take the shot.
