Mountain View, CA—The Lytro Photo Adventure offers five photographers a chance to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime, all-expense-paid trip to Iceland for an exclusive photo shoot with Chris Burkard, a premier adventure lifestyle photographer who is the senior staff photographer for Surfer magazine.
By preordering 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 Illum camera.
“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, Marketing, 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.”
The Lytro Illum is engineered to capture 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 an experiential canvas. After image capture, Lytro’s 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 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 preorder the Lytro Illum directly from Lytro before July 31, 2014, and they must upload three original images that demonstrate how the photographer plans to tell a unique visual story leveraging the 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 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 the 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 and whale watching.
In addition to the five grand-prize winners, 20 first-place winners will be selected for an all-expense-paid trip to attend the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego.
In addition to the Lytro Photo Adventure, the company is offering a variety of opportunities to those who preorder the camera before July 31, including a specially engraved Lytro Illum for an introductory price of $1,499. Preorders come with an extended two-year warranty and a special camera strap, as well as insider access to customer support, educational training and videos and more. Even after the product ships, the early adopters will continue to receive ground-floor insight and training from Lytro light field photography experts.
The Lytro Illum camera will ship starting July 31, 2014, for a retail price of $1,599. lytro.com
