Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-04-30. (read more »)

Internalizing Lytro light field photography techniques can take time and practice, but there’s an easy one that you can master in no time at all. Get a friend to hold an interesting object out in front of him and take a picture, holding your camera really close to the object. We call this picture “the present” (as in the verb, not the noun).

Here’s a living picture of Alex, one of Lytro’s handsome designers, presenting his friend’s band’s CD:

Here’s a picture of me taking that shot. I’m zoomed out all the way (full wide), and the front of my camera is about 4″ away from the CD. Note that 4″ means 4″—not 6″, 8″ or 12″. I’ve had Alex tilt the CD so it takes up less of the frame.

You can shoot from further away and still get great refocus by moving backward and zooming in. Here’s a shot taken at about 2x zoom (just over half zoomed in everyday mode).

Here’s a picture of me taking that picture. I’m zoomed in just over half way in everyday mode (about 2x).

Mastering “the present” gives you an easy way to take highly-refocusable living pictures of your friends. Give it a try!

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-04-23. (read more »)

Here’s my eye (self-portrait with a Lytro camera):

Here’s a lovely Italian woman’s eye, taken today at a Lytro press conference at the Trienalle in Milan.

Mine looks kinda dead in comparison!

Here’s a picture of me taking that picture:

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Source: @ocalao

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-04-16. (read more »)

I spent Thursday and Friday at the e.g. conference in Monterey, California, which was incrediblly inspiring. I feel really lucky to have been a part of it.

Each day, the roughly 300 attendees were given the opportunity to hear hours and hours of presentations by talented people who have done incredible things. While I found the content of the presentations to be fascinating, what I really loved was that everyone involved was doing something driven by passion, and while there were many paths to the discovery of a particular passion, they had all figured it out (some were born into it, and some only discovered it after having gone through meandering paths of adventure in other fields).

There was, however, one thing that stood out, and not in a good way: classical music.

Music at conferences like TED and e.g. are often based in the avant-garde and experimental, which can, of course, be interesting and thought-provoking. Classical instruments like the piano, violin and cello are usually part of some kind of crossover performance. The musicians are often quite talented, and the audience loves this stuff. During the 2 days I was at e.g., there were exactly two purely-classical performances, which starkly contrasted in quality when compared to the other presentations. The first was a short solo piano piece that wasn’t very well prepared, and the second, a Brahms piano trio that was pretty much sight read on stage. After the piano trio sight-reading performance, something incredible happened: the crowd gave a standing ovation! I was thoroughly confused and disappointed. If this same performance had taken place in a concert hall, all of the musicians in the audience would have walked out.

Curators at conferences like e.g. and TED need to feature classical performances that are as high in caliber as the rest of the presentations—or, leave them out entirely.

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-04-09. (read more »)

Tweets posted by @echeng during the week of 2012-04-02. (read more »)