To celebrate April Fool’s Day, we’d love to see your living pictures that trick the eye or make you laugh. Perhaps these examples will give you some ideas. Add a link to your picture in the comments, or post your picture on our Facebook Wall and we’ll use them to update this blog post.
Andrea Koenemann used Creative Mode to make this look like a picture of a real airport.
Check out the living pictures being shared by these new light field photographers and get inspired by their creativity. See a shot you like? Try to make one of your own by following the tips, videos and advice on our Learn page.
Backyard Playground by Tony Hawk, skateboarder and photographer.
The Lytro camera has been out in the wild for 4-weeks! Check out the hottest living pictures shared in March. Take a moment to give the photographers some love in the comments.
Lounging ape at the Oklahoma City Zoo
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!
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!