Ren Ng

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”