Experiment: Lytro on a Quadcopter

What do you get when you combine two recent gadget-newcomers on the upswing?
Eric Cheng, Lytro’s Director of Photography, has recently taken his first LightField pictures from a Lytro camera that was mounted on a ADS 400Q quadcopter – one of the multi-rotor helicopter drones that have been conquering the mainstream in recent years.

Between the Lytro camera’s 1/250 s minimum shutter time and the quadcopter vibrations, the resulting images are actually not bad (i.e. not shaky). However, as Cheng himself noted, shallow depth-of-field is hard to achieve with a remote-controlled flying machine that’s best used for aerial photography, and most of the pictures are pretty flat and lack refocus.

https://pictures.lytro.com/echeng/pictures/641684

https://pictures.lytro.com/echeng/pictures/641692

If these pictures have inspired you to doing it the other way around – taking pictures of your copter in flight – then Lytro user Greg Tokarski already has a head-start: His first steps in long-exposure light-painting with r/c helicopters have produced some interesting lightfield-results.

On to a more technical note: from the pictures, it appears that the camera is not interfaced with any cables.

Were these pictures taken using a WiFi remote feature? Asked via Twitter about such a remote shutter, Eric Cheng replied, “Currently, no public way to do this”.
The thought of a wireless, remote shutter release to help capture wildlife in Living Pictures, ideally even with live view, makes us think about an official feature request. :)

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