Lytro in Your Hands

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Ren

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Last year, we launched Lytro with plans to build an amazing new kind of camera. Since then, the Lytro team has worked hard to bring this technology to life and manufacture the world’s first light field camera for consumers. Today, we’ve proudly started shipping the Lytro camera to our first customers and are putting the future of light field photography in your hands.

I encourage you to spend some time with our new Learn Page, which has great videos, advice and picture challenges. These resources are designed to help you explore the light field, create your own living pictures, and share them online with your friends and family.
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Get Started Challenge #1 – Show Me

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

The Get Started Challenge is a 4-week series that uses themes and hashtags to help new Lytro camera owners get started and get inspired by each other. Check out all the Challenges.

For the first Challenge, we’ll create compelling re-focusable portraits of your friends and family by asking them to show you something they hold precious or interesting. Need help setting up this shot? It’s just like the sample shot Chris takes of his friend Katie in the “Get to know the Basics” video:

Zoom all the way out by making sure the zoom slider is all the way to the left.
Get super close to the object your friend is holding in their outstretched hand. You know you are close enough when the object starts to get visibly out of focus on your camera screen.
Frame their face in the background then press the shutter button.
Try shooting this picture a few times from slightly different distances to see how it affects your living pictures.

Share your favorite pictures. Post it to our Facebook Wall or share it on Twitter with the hashtag #lytroshowme. If we reshare your picture on Facebook, Twitter or the blog, we’ll send you a Lytro T-shirt.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Get Started Challenge #2 – Local Landmarks

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

The Get Started Challenge is a 4-week series that uses themes and hashtags to help new Lytro camera owners get started and get inspired by each other. Check out all the Challenges.

For the second Challenge, bring the classic travel shot home by making interactive pictures of your favorite people in front of their favorite neighborhood places. Need help setting up this shot? It is very similar to the second tip in the “Get to know the Basics” video when Chris takes a picture of Nicole with Steve (nice face!) in the background:

Rather than putting the camera super close to your friend’s face, you can stand a few feet back and use the zoom to frame your shot.
Zoom in, moving the zoom slider to the right until your friend’s face fills about 1/4 of the frame.
Fill the remainder of the frame with all or part of their favorite neighborhood landmark in the background, then press the shutter button.
Try shooting this picture a few times from different angles and distances to see how it affects your living pictures. For example, if the landmark is farther off in the background, your picture will have greater refocus.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Get Started Challenge #3 – Close Up

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

The Get Started Challenge is a 4-week series that uses themes and hashtags to help new Lytro camera owners get started and get inspired by each other. Check out all the Challenges.

For this third Challenge, we switch to using Creative Mode, which lets you control the refocus range of your living pictures. This mode allows you to shoot subjects that are extremely close to the lens, closer than four inches and even touching the lens. This is a great mode for shooting food – or anything else with tiny details such as jewelry, plants and insects.

Need help setting up this shot? It is just like the first shot in the “More Control with Creative Mode” video when Chris shows off his foodie tendencies by taking a close up, extreme macro shot of strawberries:

To activate Creative Mode, swipe up on the main screen then tap on the box on left. You’ll notice a blue border appears to indicate you’re in creative mode.
Get really close. You can almost touch the object you are shooting if that is how you want to frame your shot.
Tap the screen to set what you want to refocus around before you press the shutter. Make sure that the part of the object that is closest to you appears a little blurry on the screen.
Try shooting this picture a few times from slightly different distances to see how it affects your living pictures.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Get Started Challenge #4 – Outdoor Play

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

The Get Started Challenge is a 4-week series that uses themes and hashtags to help new Lytro camera owners get started and get inspired by each other. Check out all the Challenges.

The fourth Challenge is designed to help you get the shot when getting closer isn’t an option. You can capture shots of your friends and family at play when you shoot living pictures using Creative Mode. This mode allows you to use the full range of the 8X zoom and to set the center of your refocus range.

Need help setting up this shot? It is just like the second shot in the “More Control with Creative Mode” video when Chris takes a picture of Julie playing frisbee in front of the Golden Gate Bridge:

To activate Creative Mode, swipe up on the main screen then tap on the box on left. You’ll notice a blue border appears to indicate you’re in creative mode.
It helps have two to three subjects framed in your shot. Zoom in to frame the closest subject, while keeping the other two framed on your screen.
Tap the screen to set what you want to refocus around before you press the shutter.
The camera remembers where you tapped so you can keep on shooting until you want to get a new shot.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Top Tips for Zooming with the Lytro Camera

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

Zoom is your friend.

In order to compose the most compelling “living pictures”, it is important to learn how to make best use of the Lytro camera’s optical zoom. The best way to understand the effects of zoom is by taking a look at some specific examples.

No Zoom:

In this case, the zoom slider should be to the far left. This type of shot is ideal when you are either very close to the subject you’d like to have in the foreground or when you are looking to capture a wider view in the background. As you’ll see from the picture below of our subjects, Mariana and Ankit, the shot is taken with the camera rather close to Mariana’s face. This allowed the photographer to capture a wider scene.

Zoom in Everyday Mode:

You’re probably thinking to yourself that as neat as some close-up shots can be, there are many situations in which you don’t want to be so close to your main subjects. (Especially if the subject is a friend or family member.) It’s for these times that we encourage you to embrace the zoom.

Let’s take another picture of Mariana and Ankit as we did above. When no zoom was used, Mariana and Ankit could be spaced a lesser distance apart and the result was a highly re-focusable picture. This was possible because of Mariana being so close to the camera. Now, assume Mariana wants us to give her some space rather than being so close to her as we take a shot. In this case, we would stand further back from her and zoom-in to frame her in a similar manner. The big difference is that if you want to achieve another highly re-focusable “living picture”, you will need to increase the spacing between the two subjects, to compensate for the zooming in.

What does this all mean?

The main takeaway is that zoom is helpful when you want to compose a living picture, but aren’t physically close to your subject. To get the best re-focusable “living picture” when zooming, your subjects should be further apart from each other than when you are at full wide with no zoom.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Depth is your friend.

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

One of the key pieces of information that sometimes is lost in traditional photography is a sense of depth in the captured scene. When you have taken pictures in the past, there may have been little thought put into where your subject of interest should be relative to the camera. As a result, you commonly would end up with images that made less of a distinction as to how close or how far anything was in the picture.

With the Lytro camera, we encourage you to really think about this concept of depth when taking your living pictures. Since the Lytro camera is allowing you to capture the direction of light, the result is adding this extra dimension of depth in every snap that you take.

The living picture that Eric Cheng shot above shows a herd of angry sheep. (Probably because they’re inside a department store.) There are a few interesting tips that can be learned from Eric’s shot. The first is the compelling nature of capturing a pattern. In this case, the pattern is a line of identical sheep, however this could apply to nearly any pattern we may come across on an everyday basis. This is interesting because you begin to notice different things about the scene depending on which part of the picture you look at, despite each sheep being the same. By having rows of sheep in the foreground, middle ground and background, the depth is even more clearly shown.

A second tip that can be learned from Eric’s picture was that when shooting a pattern like this, it is much more engaging to capture the image from a viewpoint (in this case from slightly above the herd) which will give different levels of depth of the sheep.

Try using these tips to compose your own patterned scene.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!

Changing Your Perspective

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lytro

Inspiration can be found in a number of ways. Here at Lytro, we find that every time we see a new living picture, it inspires and encourages us to see a scene or object in an entirely new way.

In the case of Jason Bradley, he found himself in a seemingly ordinary scene of guitars at a local music shop. By thinking about the scene in a multi-dimensional way, he transformed the setting into a truly engaging living picture.

The trick here was to add depth to the scene by displaying the dominant guitar horizontally in the foreground. The wall of diverse guitars hanging in the background adds to Jason’s story as it sets a scene for where the picture takes place. These two elements create a more interesting living picture that has a wider refocus range.

The most exciting part about seeing a living picture like this is that a similar type of picture can be shot in a number of ways, with a wide range of objects and in a variety of places. We encourage trying to use this technique to capture a scene of significance to you.

Experiment. Get Creative. Happy Shooting!