According to various embodiments, a dolly zoom effect is generated using light field image data. The dolly zoom effect simulates an in-camera technique wherein a camera moves toward or away from the subject in such a way that the subject is kept at the same size throughout the effect. The effect causes the relative size of foreground background elements to change while foreground elements such as the subject remain the same size. By varying a parameter while projecting the light field image, the size of each object in the projection image scales depending on its relative depth as compared with the depth of the target subject, thus simulating the dolly zoom effect without any need to physically move the camera.