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
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
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
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
It’s very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they’re moving around all the time. – Ren Ng
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. – Ren Ng
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
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. – Ren Ng
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn’t been available in the past. – Ren Ng
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
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
Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures. – Ren Ng
Basically, with a regular camera, you have to take time or allow the camera to focus before you take the shot. – Ren Ng
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. – Ren Ng
