Ren Ng

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

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.

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.

Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.

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.

Basically, with a regular camera, you have to take time or allow the camera to focus before you take the shot.

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

It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.

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.

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.

With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.