Press Release: Lytro Launches Lytro Photo Adventure for Once-in-a-Lifetime Photography Experience

The following press release was published by Lytro on 30 June 2014.

Lytro Launches Lytro Photo Adventure for Once-in-a-Lifetime Photography Experience
Five Photographers to Win All-Expenses-Paid Trip to Iceland For Exclusive Photo Shoot with Acclaimed Adventure Photographer Chris Burkard

• Photographers that pre-order the LYTRO ILLUM light field camera and submit a photo series are eligible to win
• LYTRO ILLUM currently available for pre-order; starts shipping at the end of July 2014

Mountain View, CA — June 30, 2014 — Lytro, Inc. today announced the Lytro Photo Adventure – a chance for five photographers to win a once-in-a-lifetime, all-expenses-paid trip to Iceland to take part in an exclusive photo shoot with Chris Burkard, a premier adventure lifestyle photographer who serves as the senior staff photographer for Surfer Magazine.

By pre-ordering the LYTRO ILLUM light field camera and submitting a photo shoot idea, photographers will be eligible to win a spot in the challenge. Participants in this exclusive opportunity will gain high-caliber, hands-on training on the LYTRO ILLUM camera and create images of potentially historic importance as light field photography prepares to transform the photography landscape.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip for creative pioneers to shoot in one of the most beautiful places on the planet alongside one of the most prominent photographers in the world,” said Azmat Ali, vice president of marketing for Lytro. “In exploring the different ways to inspire creative use of light field technology in everyday photography, we identified this contest as the perfect way to celebrate the early adopters that will shape the future of photography.”

LYTRO ILLUM captures the color, intensity and direction of every light ray flowing into the camera, providing a massive amount of visual information that allows photographers to recreate sights and scenes on a truly experiential canvas. After image capture, Lytro’s innovative software platform empowers photographers to adjust aspects of images that were previously fixed, such as focus, tilt, perspective shift and depth of field.

“I have shot Iceland many times, but never in the way that LYTRO ILLUM will allow me to,” said Burkard, winner of the 2010 Red Bull Illume Image Quest whose work is layered by surf, outdoor, lifestyle and travel subjects and the search for wild, remote destinations and offbeat landscapes. “I cannot wait to experience this new photographic canvas with other photographers and capture the beauty of Iceland in its purest form.”

To enter the Lytro Photo Adventure, photographers must do the following:

• Pre-order the LYTRO ILLUM camera directly from Lytro before July 31, 2014 by visiting shop.lytro.com. (Note: U.S. only.)
• Upload three original images that demonstrate how the photographer plans to tell a unique visual story leveraging LYTRO ILLUM’s refocus ability. All three images must be of the same visual scene, captured from the same angle, with the same exposure and lighting, but the focus should be distinctly different in each image.

Winners will be judged and selected based on how compelling their visual story is, creativity, originality and use of shifting focal points. Winners will be notified in September 2014. For official rules, visit lytro.com/contest_official_rules/.

As part of this exclusive adventure, winners will explore Iceland’s remarkable outdoor offerings through a number of possible activities the region is famous for, such as paddle boarding, surfing, climbing, ice cave exploration, hiking, Northern Lights viewing, mountain biking, whale watching and more.

In addition to the five grand-prize winners, twenty first-place winners will be selected for an all-expenses-paid trip to attend the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego.

LYTRO ILLUM Availability
The LYTRO ILLUM camera will ship starting July 31, 2014, for a retail price of $1,599.

In addition to the Lytro Photo Adventure, Lytro is offering a variety of exclusive opportunities to those who pre-order the camera before July 31, including a specially engraved LYTRO ILLUM for an introductory price of $1,499. Pre-orders also come with an extended two-year warranty and a special camera strap, as well as insider access to premium customer support, educational training, videos and more. Even after the product ships, this nucleus of early adopters will continue to receive ground-floor insight and training from Lytro Light Field Photography experts.

For more information about LYTRO ILLUM, please visit lytro.com/camera.

About Lytro
Lytro is reinventing photography by combining a novel hardware array with cutting-edge computational graphics to capture a more complete and immersive picture of the world in three dimensions. Lytro is the first company to bring an entirely new category, Light Field Photography, to the consumer and professional markets by transforming the camera into a powerful computational photography platform that fundamentally captures a richer set of image data compared to conventional digital or film cameras. Founder and Executive Chairman Dr. Ren Ng, whose Ph.D. research on Light Field Photography won Stanford University’s prize for best thesis in computer science in 2006, as well as the internationally recognized ACM Dissertation award, founded the company in 2006. For additional information, visit Lytro.com.