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!