Last week we shipped our first Lytro cameras, and this week we got to meet some of our first owners who brought their own cameras to San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Building. “It was an arrival point to look out at all these people with a Lytro camera in their hands…complete with wrist staps,” said Eric Cheng, our director of photography.
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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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Our Picture Gallery features Lytro living pictures taken by professional photographers in our Pro Shooter Program, our Director of Photography, Eric Cheng, and our founder, Ren Ng. In recent weeks, we’ve also added pictures taken by Lytro employees. Many of them proudly claim photography as a hobby or creative outlet, while others on the team aren’t afraid to admit that they only take pictures for fun.
Member of Technical Staff Mugur Marculescu loves photography and rarely leaves home without a camera, favoring his Canon 20D paired with an L-series 16-35mm F/2.8 lens (although practicalities sometimes cause him to rely on his cell phone’s camera.) Mugur explains how he took this picture of a squirrel with the Lytro while walking through Union Square during a recent trip to New York:
“This shot is all about timing and the ability to refocus after the picture is taken. Since I didn’t need to worry about adjusting focus, I could focus just on the timing. I knew that if I approached, the squirrel would walk up to me in anticipation of food. The only thing left was to click the shutter button at the correct time. The entire event lasted about 5 seconds and I was able to capture 3 great shots. This is one of those shot opportunities meant for a Lytro.”
Mugur shared this, about his first time shooting with the Lytro:
“You can take a snapshot of anything just like with a regular camera, but to really take advantage of this new medium and create beautiful re-focusable images, you have to start thinking in three dimensions. It took me back to the time I first picked up a camera; it’s as if I was discovering photography for the first time—again.”
… and this, about how using a light field camera is impacting his style and technique:
“I now think about depth in a whole new way. I am constantly looking for layers of objects in a scene, complex three-dimensional shapes, lines and textures leading off into the distance and things like shiny surfaces and water droplets.
The extremely-quick power-up time and unique shape has changed how I shoot street scenes. When walking in a city, moments happen so fast—you have to act very quickly. I am able to take the camera out of my coat pocket, orient it and power it on in one continuous motion that takes about 1 second. The next moment, the shutter will snap without delay. These types of candid shots are nearly impossible with my DSLR—the focus and timing would just fail.”
In addition to the squirrel, Mugur’s other featured pictures include Continue reading
On the Lytro Blog, we try to share a little of Lytro’s story, about our business and employees. We’ve also shared the story of our first employees. Now, we’re excited to to be able to share the story of our first customer, Josh Bonk. Josh managed to place his order in the first minute after cameras went on sale on Lytro.com.
We asked Josh for a little background on his interest in the Lytro and he shared, “I first heard about Lytro reading through the techblogs Engadget and Gizmodo. I saw it and just thought it was something completely different. It really just seemed fun. I’m not an avid photographer; I’ll typically use my iPhone or let someone else take all the photos and just grab a copy for myself after its all said and done. I thought this would be a lot of fun for weddings and really when traveling.”
This photo of Josh’s nephew, “Gibson the Moose,” is just the type of picture he looks forward to shooting with his Lytro. Our team is working hard so we can see Gibson imitate other native habitat in living pictures.
Imagine inventing an entirely new kind of car engine that runs on, say, bacon. Well, you can’t just stick your new bacon engine into your car and expect it to run perfectly. You need to engineer it, then smooth out the kinks so that your bacon car runs as well as any other. And, since you’re the inventive type, you probably want the bacon engine to allow you to do something magical – something more than just driving around like you could in a regular car.
Same story with the Lytro camera…minus the bacon.
It takes a village to bring Lytro to life, but three engineers on the Lytro image quality team are core to turning complex engineering into the simple beauty you see in living pictures.
In their element - Brian Cabral, Bennett Wilburn and Chia-Kai Liang (photo: Eric Cheng)
Engineers Brian Cabral, Bennett Wilburn, and Chia-Kai Liang represent some serious brainpower in the fields of light field science and computational photography. Brian’s background includes high-level positions at NVIDIA and Silicon Graphics, with quite a few patents and papers in computer graphics and computational photography. Chia-Kai received his PhD from National Taiwan University where his thesis was about light field capturing and processing. Bennett was on his way to a PhD in circuit design at Stanford, but switched his focus (pun intended) to computer graphics and vision. For this thesis, he designed the Stanford Multiple Camera Array, a system with 100 custom video cameras that could capture light field video. Yikes, brainpower, indeed.
When Ren looks up to the sky out of the corner of his eye, you know he has something cooking. Four years ago, he was working on the menu for a gourmet meal… Kinda hokey, but we thought it might be fun to share our story from the very beginning – a little primer on how to start a picture revolution.
Back when our founder Ren Ng was still a PhD candidate working on his dissertation at Stanford University, he saw the enormous potential for light field cameras. He also realized if he wanted to succeed at making a business out of his ideas, he would need a team with unique skills – plus, a triple-shot of persistence.
Ren’s Original Believers
Just Chillin' - Ren's Original Believers - Tim, Colvin and Alex
Colvin Pitts, Tim Knight, and Alex Fishman made up the initial team of engineers Ren hired at what was then called… (we know, we’re a tease – read more here)