REN NG

DSLRs take beautiful pictures, but they are hard to focus.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Basically, with a regular camera, you have to take time or allow the camera to focus before you take the shot.

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.

Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.

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.

On the personal side, I was rock climbing and taking pictures with my friends. We took all sorts of portrait and action pictures, and I was thinking at the time that these are inherently difficult to focus correctly.

I am a very keen photographer. I have enjoyed taking pictures since I was a kid with my family, but I became more serious about it at university.

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

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

I was reluctant to start the company that would become Lytro, primarily due to my academic background.