I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom.
It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.
With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
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.
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.
There's something about light field photography that's just magical.
Like many people out there, I'm inspired by the level of attention to detail, design and execution of Apple products.
Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.
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.
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.
The merging of science and art is at the core of what we do.
We have seen amazing, creative and interactive pictures from camera owners, and I'm looking forward to the Lytro camera being available in Australia.
There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
I was reluctant to start the company that would become Lytro, primarily due to my academic background.
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.
The reason we know as human beings that pictures have to be focused before you take the shot is because we know if we're not focusing our eyes on something that happens, then it's too late - you can't go searching in your memory to find it because that light never struck your mind.
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.
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.
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.
