Lytro Illum Base Camp

Fields of light amidst the earthscape of living images!

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GameOn! with a Lytro!

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More test shot!

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More tests!

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Daily shoot log with the Lytro Illum!

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Field-testing the Lytro Illum here in Benxi’s deluxe hotspring resort!

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So What’s the Verdict?

For one, it doesn’t like the extreme temperature of the harsh wintery North, totally shutting down into a dead silence when exposed momentarily. Twenty below freezing is, to be fair, not exactly a temperature most camera can withstand anyway.

The Lytro Illum can deliver some decent stills if you know how to go about crafting your meticulous shot followed by a rather awkward workflow on a beefy computer. This skill sure come in very handy when you simply cannot find a subject set to stack your shot with.  Yes, I do shoot it with my Manfrotto LED array mounted on its hot shoe when ambient light is weak, knowing the Illum’s  inability to properly focus in low lights.

In addition, the Lytro desktop 5 will occasionally crash on the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system, making relaunching the app a slight inconvenience, when compared to her Mac OS X variant, which it totally refuse to even run on.

More to come, as I continue my exploration of this wonderful camera!

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Interesting color of the Lytro Illum...

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Mastering the Lytro Illum in a rural village of Benxi China.

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The experience of my first-week shooting with a Lytro Illum can be described pretty much like using my Lensbaby, or a flying drone for that matter. It’s not for everyone, and only serve a very, very niche application area - one that I believe can only become compelling,  when much more time is invested to first study a preempted scene.

The learning curve is very steep, and a huge dose of patience is required. They are not lying when they said that you need the most powerful hardware to process each piece of work. You do.

Ideally, a more powerful hardware is needed. But practically, my 3-year-old 16GB Quad-core Macbook Pro should do, provided I don’t shoot exclusively with the Lytro Illum on any planned trip. I will strongly suggest the use of a tripod should you wish to join me to dabble with the camera for any real assignments.

In all, the Lytro Illum is one unforgiving camera to use, and not recommended for an amateur or enthusiast; but rather for someone who embrace joy in suffering each meticulous step towards the art of delivering a compelling visual story.

Will I keep it? Sure I will! Its my Christmas present of 2017!

Enjoy 2018!

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The fun never ends!

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New camera policy - Always shoot first, ask question later.

Hand held shot.

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Trigger-happy night shoot with the Lytro Illum!

Hand held.

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A quick note on hardware requirement when processing Illum’s living pictures - On a 7th generation i5 U class processor running at 3.1 GHz, we are looking at a whopping 15 minutes to process and export one living image into a FHD 6-second video clip (max quality).

Now, that can become a real issue if time is of essence.

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Field test has just begun! Here’s the first live image to be generated with the Lytro Illum!

Color, saturation, sharpness all checks out decent. Ease of focus is good. Nothing bad to report thus far! Really fun way to capture images in a whole different way.

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Step 0 - Pairing your Lytro Illum with your PC

Finally found a slice of spare time to unbox the Lytro Illum yesterday and thought it nice to share what fundamentally needs done before we can proceed any further. Well, its a very well-built light field camera from a casual inspection, with it looking rather handsome if I may say.

The camera came with the latest firmware at 2.0 (42), with the desktop application at 5.0. Should you have jumped straight into wanting to edit your first light field raw image, you will be routed back to the need to perform a one-time first transfer of the camera pairing data onto the memory card before opening your first xRAW file.

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Light Field 101

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than that captured in regular images. The light field fully defines the visual content of a scene. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the individual light rays in a scene.

The cameras captured a hundred images with corresponding focal points in unison, and software combined them into a light field. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and direction of a dense sampling of the rays of light flowing into the camera. The directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays at each pixel and record them as a single amount of light.

The way we communicate visually is evolving rapidly, and people’s expectations are changing in lockstep. Light field cameras offer astonishing capabilities. They allow both the picture taker and the viewer to refocus pictures after they’re snapped, to re-orient the scene by shifting the perspective view, and even to switch between 2D and 3D views.

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New Introduction to the Family - Lytro Illum

Just when things of photography are spiralling down a slippery slope of stale dismay and boredom, did Lytro slashed their USD1599 lightfield camera price down, to me actually wanting to pick one up.

Call it a toy or gimmck but I will definitely be putting myself through a rather steep re-learning curve towards photography in 2018 with this!

A new blog has been created especially for this, as customary to what we do here - lytrostudio.tumblr.com. Check it out!

Welcome to 2018!