Lytro: The Most Social Camera Ever Made [REVIEW]

Photography, here is your wake-up call. Lytro just released its light-field camera to the world, a device that looks and acts like no other camera ever made. Mashable got an early preview of the Lytro camera, and we can say it definitely delivers on its promise to change the way you think about photos.

Lytro, you may recall, is the company behind a new kind of photography. Because the Lytro camera captures the entire light field in its view — not just the color and intensity of light rays but also their direction — it can do tricks other cameras can’t do. The main one: being able to change the focus of your photo after you take a photo, what Lytro calls a “living picture.”

That one feature sounds like a huge boon to anyone who snapped off what they thought was a perfect moment only to find that the camera was focused on the tree in the background rather then your toddler, who just stood still when you asked for the first time in his life. The Lytro puts every other “intelligent” focusing solution (multiple focus points, face detection, etc.) to shame by simply removing focus as a variable.

With that one feature, the Lytro camera enables you to tell different stories with the same picture. By changing which subject is in focus, the photo may reveal that the blurred person in the background is actually looking right at the camera rather than off in the distance. Even when your subjects aren’t looking at anything in particular, the story can change. Like they say, a picture does a much better job explaining:

Of course, the photo needs the viewer to click and refocus, so sharing becomes key. The entire Lytro experience — from the photos’ square shape to the software to the camera itself — is centered around sharing. Lytro, at least right now, has much more in common with creative apps like Instagram than, say, the multi-featured DSLR photography from the likes of Canon and Nikon.

But just how easy is it to capture those focus-flexible photos, full of different stories, with the Lytro? Well, it’s easy — when you know how.

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Photography Still Matters

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Speaking casually to a photographer friend of mine about the Lytro, he said, “At some point, it stops being photography and it’s just pointing at stuff.” It’s an expected criticism from someone whose career is centered around the art of photos, but it’s misplaced. As I discovered early in my time with the Lytro, lots of things still matter when taking light-field pictures.

There are two models of Lytro, and they vary in only three ways: the amount of storage, color and the price. The entry model costs $399, has 8GB of storage and comes in graphite and “electric blue.” There’s also the 16GB “red hot” model that costs $499.

As soon as you take the Lytro out of its delightful packaging, you’re going to want to fire it up and start snapping some focus-free photos. And you should, but chances are those first few photos are going to be disappointing.

Here’s why: The incredible refocusing effect is fairly muted when you don’t use the camera’s 8x zoom. And the instinct of most photographers is to use the zoom as sparingly as possible. That instinct does not serve capturing good Lytro pics. You should zoom, and zoom often. Zoom still matters. You can see the difference in the following two photos — the first is taken with a 57mmThe

 Lytro has a constant f/2 aperture when taking pictures, so the camera automatically adjusts the shutter speed and ISO for every shot you take. There’s also no flash. Thanks to a special image sensor, the camera can give good detail in low light, but the amount of “film grain” in your shots (a telltale sign of high ISO) starts to become noticeable quickly. Lighting still matters.

Since there’s no flash, any shot you take in less than idea light will have a relatively long shutter speed. You can’t just whip the camera around and snap away, and it’s not the best camera for sports photography — especially indoors. Camera shake still matters.

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Getting Great Lytro Photos

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All that’s fine, and serves as a good reminder that, while this is a new kind of photography, the Lytro isn’t magic. You still need some modicum of skill and patience to get the most out of this thing.

You also should have a sense of what this camera is for. This is not a camera for pros or science nerds interested in mining light fields. This is primarily a camera for casual photographers — people who probably take most of their pictures on a cellphone or a Flip camera. It’s simple to use, and the photos are clearly crafted for sharing.

You’ll get photos with the most dramatic refocusing effects if you do three simple things:

1. Get up close and personal with your subject. Don’t be afraid to jam the Lytro right in the face of the person (or whatever) that you want in the foreground. Indeed, if you don’t do this the focus effect, while present, won’t be that pronounced. You may need to use the Lytro’s Creative Mode to help you if you’re really close (more on that in a bit).
2. Zoom. A lot. Zooming in will emphasize the difference in focus between subjects even more. Of course, it may also push some things out of the frame, so use carefully.
3. Have a “distant” background. To get the maximum blur/focus effect on your foreground subject, try to have something in the background that’s very far away. If you’re outside, this should be easy, but indoors it helps to either shoot in front of a window (with distant objects outside) or frame your shot with a wall as far back as possible.

I find that the most dramatic shots are ones where you can actually refocus throughout an object. That is, being able to refocus on, say, different parts of someone’s face — the nose up front, the ears on the side, the eyes, etc.

To create a shot like that, you’ll need to use Creative Mode. This is about as “pro” as the Lytro gets, and it’s pretty simple. What Creative Mode does is change the center of focus — essentially the “default” distance that the camera uses as a reference for your refocusing range. In regular mode, the minimum distance (where things start to go blurry no matter what) is about 6 inches. In Creative Mode, it’s wherever you want; just tap your target on the screen, and the center-of-focus zeros in on that subject. Here’s a video that quickly demonstrates how Creative Mode works:

Once I got the hang of Creative Mode, I used it all the time. It really is the best way to get dramatic Lytro pics, and you can see it in full force in the lizard picture below. Notice how you can refocus on any part of the lizard you want — as well as the background.

One weakness of Creative Mode: If you make something in the extreme foreground your center of focus (which you’ll probably want to do every time), the extreme background will be permanently out of focus. Again, this isn’t magic, and even light-field photography has limits.

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Sharing and Software

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The “light field engine” on board the Lytro does the heavy lifting in making a photo you can refocus. It then creates a self-contained file — an “.lfp” file — that you transfer to your Mac. Yep, your Mac. PCs aren’t invited to the Lytro party just yet, but the company says Windows software is in the works.

Until Lytro makes its light-field format available to companies like Adobe (which it says it plans to do), the only way you’ll be able to see Lytro photos (other than on the camera itself) is via the company’s software. Fortunately, that software is web-based, so you can invite anyone to see your pics via a link to it on Lytro.com. Once they’re on the Lytro site, you can also embed them on any website (as I’ve done here)

You can also share Lytro living pictures on the world’s biggest photo-sharing site: Facebook. You can share either from your account on Lytro.com or straight from they Lytro client software. When someone first clicks on the photo, the pic politely tells the person that that they can click to refocus and double click to zoom.

Like I said before, the Lytro experience is all about sharing. When I spoke to company reps while preparing for this review, I asked why all the photos are square-shaped? To make them more shareable was the answer.

However, that aspect ratio is locked, so forget changing it. In fact there’s no editing software of any kind; no adjusting, cropping or even touching up your photos. What you’ve captured is what you’ve got, at least for now — Lytro says editing software is in the works.

A nice bonus: Clicking on the Info button while viewing a photo in the client or on Lytro.com reveals the date, shutter speed, ISO, focal length and whether or not the picture was taken in Creative Mode. You generally don’t get that level of information with most cameras — one of the benefits of the image format coming from the same company that makes your hardware.

An annoying detail: The magnetic lens cap seems almost designed so you’ll lose it. The magnet holds it pretty loosely, and it has a propensity to slide off. I know Lytro’s trying to stand out with its design, but a regular cap that snaps in place would have been a much better choice.

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The Killer App

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It’s true that the Lytro requires a different way of thinking about your photos. Fortunately, camera phones have been getting people to think less about focus and more about sharing for years. While the choice to target only Mac users right out of the gate is a bit perplexing, emphasizing sharing via Facebook is an excellent, if not essential move.

The social aspect is where Lytro lives or dies. If its early adopters start telling stories with their cameras — and those stories are worth sharing — Lytro will transition from curious trick to phenomenon. Will those living pictures on Facebook, with their oddly addictive refocusing magic, make people want to experience the Lytro camera for themselves? All I can say is I’m hooked, and it would be a shame for such a promising technology to sputter because not enough people “got” it.