Unlike regular digital or film cameras, which can only record a scene in two dimensions, light field cameras capture all of the light rays traveling in every direction through a scene. This means that some aspects of a picture can be manipulated after the fact.

Ren Ng

Categorized in : Picture Direction Light Capture

It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.

Ren Ng

candid time children moving

Light-field photography is a transformational technology that needs a transformational product to introduce it. For the first time, we have a light-field camera that's going to be for everyone - not something in a huge room in a research facility.

Ren Ng

camera technology research time

For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera.

Ren Ng

camera picture light impossible

The first light-field camera array I saw at Stanford had a bunch of applications, like to do special effects like you see in 'The Matrix,' where you spin the camera around in frozen motion. It took up an entire room.

Ren Ng

camera see you special

Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together.

Ren Ng

bench light path together

Yes, we are a producer of cameras, but we understand that at the end of the day, you have to make photos in software. A lot of companies focus on the camera side, and a lot are on the software side. There's a chasm between the two.

Ren Ng

end-of-the-day day you focus

There's something about light field photography that's just magical.

Ren Ng

something just light photography

I just love taking pictures.

Ren Ng

taking pictures just love

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.

Ren Ng

direction picture you war

With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.

Ren Ng

technology light opportunity past

We have seen amazing, creative and interactive pictures from camera owners, and I'm looking forward to the Lytro camera being available in Australia.

Ren Ng

pictures camera looking amazing

Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.

Ren Ng

pictures light change power

Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University.

Ren Ng

always university passion light

I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.

Ren Ng

picture loved daughter impossible

Catching the right fleeting moment, with the right focus, is a very difficult thing to do.

Ren Ng

right moment difficult focus

The merging of science and art is at the core of what we do.

Ren Ng

merging core science art

With Illum, we're able to start to customize that supply chain in a very deep way... to rethink the entire imaging pipeline.

Ren Ng

chain deep start way

I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.

Ren Ng

see me always medical

If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact.

Ren Ng

camera you light opportunity

When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus.

Ren Ng

camera doing focus different