Little More Lytro

I've had a little more time to play with the Lytro camera, with better lit hours than my commutes before and after work, which seems to make some difference.

I work half days on Fridays, so I got to use it on my commute from Grand Central Terminal to our apartment on W. 49th Street in Hell's Kitchen in the bright part of mid-afternoon, before 2pm.  And then a little later, out and about with my wife as we went for lunch in Hell's Kitchen then across Times Square and Rockefeller Center, up 5th Avenue to the Upper East Side, till it was getting darker.

I took well over 100 photos with Lytro and got a few decent ones out of it...

Lytro Camera

Yesterday I got a new Lytro light field camera.  I haven't had much chance to try it out yet, and not in broad daylight.

The first thing I liked about it was the information message when I plugged it into the computer and there were no photos on it.  It gave a helpful tip on how to handle it:

What to do?  Disconnect that camera from your computer and get out there, in the wide world, and take some pictures!

The perfect message...

So far my results aren't so great.  The pictures are all grainy and none of mine have come out with the clarity of the ones on Lytro's website.  But then, I've only played at twilight hours, and it's mostly picking a high, grainy ISO.

I need to read the manual more and figure it, plus do some playing during regular daytime on the weekend.

Some of them are here on my Lytro page...

Here's an example, if I get the HTML right:

India Day Parade 2012 with Leena

Leena and I went to the Indian Independence Day parade on Madison Avenue today.  Overall it was fun, though the music from some of the floats was a little loud for my sensitive ears.

The full album, with captions and what-not is available on my Google albums (I don't know why these aren't better integrated...)

We took the subway down from 49th Street, where we live, to 23rd Street near the Flatiron Plaza and walked through Madison Square Park to Madison Avenue.

One thing we did wrong was stop at 28th Street instead of going further up Madison Avenue.  The parade reviewing stand was just one block up from us, and some of the parade floats emptied out there, including the one with the grand marshall, Bollywood star, Saif Ali Khan, so we didn't get to see him (Leena said "no big deal" because he used to be a jerk when they were kids and he went to play with the kids in her apartment building).

Here's probably some of the first photos I've posted here with Leena...

I used my SLR with my Canon 35mm f/1.4 L series lens and a lot of the shots came out pretty well.  I used the camera in automatic, no-flash mode mostly.