Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week has kicked off in New York and Style Network is bringing you the first light field pictures from the runway. Lytro’s Director of Photography, Eric Cheng, is in New York capturing vibrant moments everywhere from behind the scenes to the streets of New York City.
Check out picture galleries from Czar by Cesar Galindo, L. Catherine London and 4 Corners of a Circle and Hope McGrath/Nastuko Kanno.
Are you ready for the biggest college football game of the year? The BCS Championship game is coming up and we’ve Lytro-ized a potential winner! Who do you think will win the big game, Notre Dame or Alabama?
The wait is over. The Perspective Shift and Living Filters update is now available for camera owners. After updating the Lytro Desktop Software, they will be able to share their own living pictures with Perspective Shift and Living Filters. When those pictures are shared, whether on Facebook, Twitter or via email, everyone can play with Perspective Shift and Living Filters, no special software needed.
We work with some amazing photographers who have had an advance opportunity to use these new features. Check out this video interview with Lytro Pro Shooter Trey Ratcliff, who runs the leading travel photography website, Stuck in Customs:
As you might expect, many of us who work at Lytro are major sci-fi and comic book nerds, so we were really excited to find out that we would be attending Comic-con this year as one of our first summer events. Even on the plane down, we saw more comic-books and blue hair than average on a flight to San Diego.
Once we arrived, we immediately found matches made in heaven. So many fans were wearing amazing costumes and obviously loved to have their pictures taken. And if there were ever going to be a camera that could be a super hero, it would have to be the Lytro camera! Our costumed friends had as much interest in the Lytro as we had in them.
Check out our Day 1 Comic-con gallery of all the great people we met today, and we’ll be sharing even more over the next few days.
Our first summer event is here! San Diego is about to be invaded by the most powerful super heroes and we’ll be there to capture it all! Lytro will be attending Comic-Con International in San Diego this weekend taking pictures of your favorite comic book characters. If you’re planning on attending, we’ll be at the following events, please come by and say “hi” and be a part of the picture revolution.
Lytro Activities:
Check back here on the Lytro Blog for live updates from the convention with pictures of all your favorite characters, daily updates on what’s hot and social contests (read: free Lytro cameras!) from the streets of San Diego.
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!
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
We’ve read some online comments and conversations from curious people who want to learn more about our light field picture (LFP) format. To help get answers, we did some research with our CTO, Kurt Akeley, to understand more about our team’s work on light field pictures.
A portion of the Stanford Multi-Camera Array that was used to create light field pictures in the early 2000s. (photo: Eric Cheng)
The leading question— why doesn’t the Lytro use an existing picture format? The team had to develop a unique picture format because light field pictures contain fundamentally different data than do traditional photographs, and because they use those data very differently to generate the images you see. The information is different because, while traditional cameras capture the intensity of the light, the sensor on our light field camera captures both the intensity and the direction of light. In total, 11 million rays (11 megarays) are captured, each describing the intensity of light along a path through the sensor. The information is used differently because megaray data are not viewed directly, but instead are projected from their (4-dimensional) ray space to a 2-dimensional image that you can view. As Kurt describes it, when you interact with a light field picture—for example, when you refocus it—”you aren’t changing the captured light field data, but are instead changing parameters that control projection of those data to the sequence of 2-D images that you see. Thus, light field pictures are ‘living pictures,’ and they make different demands of a picture format than do traditional photographs.”
Collecting and processing these different data presented an opportunity to rethink the picture format with specific goals in mind. Chief among these goals was to make it easy to share light field pictures online, despite the substantial megaray data involved. This goal is important because our company is focused on building cameras for the information age, which is all about online sharing and interaction. Sixty billion photos were shared on Facebook in 2010, and that number is expected to exceed 100 billion photos in 2011. However, the work required to achieve a standard of simple sharing is itself quite challenging.
Close-up view of a light field sensor that makes it possible for the Lytro camera to fit in your pocket.
One key was allowing living picture contents to be adapted depending on the requirements of the device on which they are viewed: the desktop, the web, or a mobile device. How does this work? When you shoot with a Lytro light field camera, each living picture includes the captured megaray data, along with public and private metadata that describe the circumstances of the picture. The Lytro desktop application receives these living pictures when you synchronize your camera with it. Because the megaray data are included, the desktop application can generate any of a wide range of projections of these data, including refocused images, or stereo image pairs for viewing on 3D displays.
Here’s the trick, though. When a living picture is shared, the viewer doesn’t have to download the original LFP. Instead, the megaray data are replaced with data that are optimized for viewing online or on a mobile device, dramatically reducing its size and simplifying the process of computing subsequent projections. (Of course, the megaray data remain in the original living picture stored by the desktop application.) Making sharing simple is the reason living pictures need a home “in the cloud”—it is the reason each Lytro camera purchase also gives you the ability to share and view your pictures on Lytro.com.
This is just the beginning of our work to explore the full potential of light field technology. For now, we’re very focused on getting the first Lytro camera in people’s hands. But, we are also thinking about developers. Besides supporting easy online sharing, another goal in designing our LFP format was to make it extensible to support future capabilities. Want to explore with us? Sign up for developer updates.