It's June the 15th. I'm Chris and this is the future of photography. The future of photography. And we're back with another episode. Jeremiah, I love your glasses. I'm celebrating the impending arrival of summer. And so I thought I'd put on some shades. It's been very summerish here for like a month at least. So anyway, okay. 3D or let's say, yeah, the third dimension. We have a topic to talk about today which has been triggered by a new toy that I just acquired. And it's not about stereo photography even though, well, there's a little connection there. So it's 3D with atoms rather than actual matter, yes? That's right, rather than the 3D that is illusory that we covered a few weeks ago. So yeah, I got myself a 3D printer. And I was always cautious of getting one because, you know, you see people who get these and then all they do is print things for their printer and lots of trinkets and things. And that was the assumption that that would end up in just me creating a lot of plastic waste. And expensively. So does this mean now that you've had it under control or getting it under control that I can just kind of send you an email going, you know, I could use an adapter from X to Y. I'm not sure the shipping from Germany to Los Angeles would work out. But in theory, yes, of course. So 3D printing. And of course there's a link to photography, we'll get to that, for sure. 3D printing comes in different flavors, the flavors, varieties. And the one that I'm using is the one that pretty much will probably be in everyone's mind. And that's called FDM Fusion, Fuse Deposition Modeling. So it's pretty much you're printing this sausage of molten plastic on top of each other. And layer by layer, you build up a 3D model, okay? Here's a question. Sure. Once you have your model built, I always noticed that it has kind of hard articulated ridges around it due to the nature of the material. True. If you took a blowtorch to that, could you smooth it out? Okay, so first of all, what I learned in the last few days is that, yes, there are layers, and you have these what's called layer lines. And if you scratch over the 3D model with your fingernail, you can feel them. But these layers are now really tiny. We're talking a seven, 8,000th of an inch per layer. So that's like five layers on a millimeter, which means that the detail is really much so much better than I had in mind when I last looked at this. So follow-up question would be, if I used a viscous paint to move over it, theoretically, it should smooth and fill in those micro ridges. Yes, there are methods to do this. The blowtorch, well, it's a thermal plastic, so it will melt at a specific temperature. Of course, that's how it works. I think, well, what people will do is use some primer spray paint primer to fill these ridges and then might sand it down for something that needs to be really smooth and then paint it. So there are ways to get rid of these lines. But honestly, let me show you something here. This is a rubber ducky. This is a little rubber, let me cover my eyes so the camera can focus on that. Almost pull it closer to you. Focus, there you go. Anyway, I'm trying to get closer. Ah, the lens doesn't cooperate. Anyway, this is a third of an inch rubber ducky printed in black plastic and the detail is astounding. It really is astounding. There's so much detail in this thing. It's hard to show, but I've uploaded a photo to our shared photo store. So, link is in the show notes. Everyone can have a look at that. Is that the extra large size that you could print? No, well, I could print. Okay, so let's continue. The size of printing depends on the printer, of course, how big the print volume is. And what I found out over the last, let's say, a couple of weeks is that 3D printing has almost completely lost its nerd exclusivity, right? It used to be for a very specific type of person who loves to fiddle with things and mod things and try out a hundred of different things. This whole thing has turned into a very accessible kind of a plug-and-play deal. All right, so we're talking literally plug it in, download a ready-made model like the rubber duck press print, and that's it. Question, the file, is it an SVG file? What's the file name? There's different 3D file types. The one that is most commonly used is called STL. Okay, if you have an STL file, is it like a? Yes, is it like a vector file in that if I have a STL file and I use a small tabletop 3D printer, can I take that very same STL? I go like, oh, this is a beautiful maquette or experiment. I want this to be much bigger with more detailed and a stronger material, I use the metal, so just send that same file, no adaption adaptation at all, and theoretically I should get a larger version of it. Yeah, exactly, that's hard work. So no stair-stepping or anything when you're when you upsize it. Current modern 3D printers are also surprisingly silent. So we're talking something that you could easily sit in the same room and have a conversation with someone. It's like under 50 decibels in a three feet distance. So really surprising. And these things have turned amazingly affordable. That's the thing that really blew me away, because that's the reason I have one now, because I just recently saw a sale and we're not being sponsored, but I got a bamboo lab A1 mini, which is right now $199. Wow! $199. That's like 10 Starbucks. And it is pretty much by everyone referred to as the ideal beginners 3D printer. But that doesn't mean it's bad, it means that it is easy to use. So $200, you can buy it with a color changer, as in you could print four different colors in one print. Let's say you want this little rubber ducky with white eyes, that would be easily doable this way. And then it's like in the bundle, it's like $340. So build volume is seven inches squared, which isn't huge, but it works for most of the things that I needed for. You can also cut up a bigger model and have it printed in multiple tiles, and then just glue it together. The Lego version. Yes, even with pins that will register, so you could have like two parts of it and they will fit nicely together. What's the software like? Fairly easy. So the way this works is that you need a 3D model. There's online resources like printables.com or thingyverse.com or makeaworld.com. They have like thousands and thousands of pre-made different 3D models. And you can download them and you drop them into the software that comes with it. And the software is a so-called slicer. So what that does is as the printer has to print these different layers, the slicer takes that 3D model and slices it up into all these different slices. Let's say your model prints in 500 layers, then it would internally create 500 slices. Pretty much to tell the printer now move the head there, squeeze out this much molten plastic, move it over there and so on and so on. How long can it take to print that little ducky? Five minutes maybe. Oh, very many minutes. Very fast. We are talking about a fast little printer. So the one thing that the hello world of the 3D printing world is called a benchy. It's a little benchmark ship. That's why it's called benchy. And that has some properties that is kind of tough for 3D versions of print. And the benchy usually prints in an hour or two. That thing, I think the fastest this thing can print a decent benchy is in 15 minutes. Which is you hear these, you hear these tales of like, okay, this print took 45 hours. And I had a power outage in the middle and then I had to start over again. No, this thing is quick compared to other printers. And it has recovery stuff in it. So even during a power outage, it can recover from there. Can you use LiDAR to convert to SVG? That would be software outside of the printer. But you could theoretically, if you circled, say, a person and got a 3D, well, basically a version, I'm not going to call a 3D, but you'd go to a 360 view. Of course. Which was convertible into a model, I guess. There is software online that you can throw in a video of you circling around a person and then it would make that into a bust, absolutely. So the materials are like, yeah, is a plastic, but they're different plastic materials. There's hard plastic, PTG, you know, PLA, PETG, these are the hard plastics. They're soft, rubbery, burethane plastic, TPU, which you could make. I don't know, you could print a gasket for your sink, for example. Strong enough, absolutely. There's translucent filaments that you can print from. There's even stuff that looks like metal. And again, countless 3D models for download, art, educational stuff, household stuff. You're saying it's a rabbit hole that knows no depth. But you get your results really quick. That's a thing, you get it to results really quickly. I unboxed this thing, I plugged it in. I read the Quick Start guide, which is five pages. And I was off printing. So you don't have to spend four weeks studying a whole new thing. You can if you want to. The software allows you to do a lot of things like specify exact print speeds and different parameters. You don't have to. You don't have to. This thing is really foolproof. Okay, print speeds is printing like printing on a paper printer. The slower the speed, the finer the detail. Is it the same thing or depending on material? So the printer comes with a nozzle. And that nozzle is by default, usually 0.4 millimeters. And that kind of determines the print speed. Like how much plastic can you squeeze out of that thing in a given time and how big is it? How wide is the trail going to be? You can also put a 0.2 millimeter nozzle in there. But that will make your printing slower, but add more detail. Even though what comes as default is really good. So very convinced. And you can also kind of double the size and be really fast, but then you have layer lines that you would really feel. So it really depends on what you want to do. Let's see. I'm being very, very tempted, right? Again, we're not sponsored. I wish we were because I'm all over this product right now. And we are beginning to see AI generated 3D models, of course. There are models, by the way, let me put this on the screen while we talk. There are models that are parametric. As in you can specify different parameters of the model, like example. Simply example, you have a vacuum cleaner and you want to attach a hose that doesn't fit. So you'd need an adapter of sorts with a hose diameter on one side and then one on a different diameter on the other side. There are parametric things. As in, you can open that and put in your diameters and your sizes. And it creates the model for you at that specific size. Or just take a picture of it uploaded to GPT for on me and say, "I need to adapt this. What are the relative sizes?" I bet you will get this specific parameters. At this point, I think I'm happier with just measuring it. That's crazy. Punching in the numbers. I trust that more. But then what comes out of the printer is what you're looking for. I've seen parametric things for like, "Okay, you could have a, I don't know, you need a specific sorting tray for your drawer." Then you give it the sizes and how many small compartments you want in there. And then it spits out the model and you can print that. I don't know. Shower baskets. Your shower, you need a basket to put your soap in and something in there and hang it somewhere. And that has a specific size and every shower is different. So that you could make one of those parametric and so on. I don't think that would be the motivating reason to buy the printer because you could probably pick one up for $7 or $3,000 on a printer. And the several hours to get a soap dish. But why not? We could have exactly the one that fits for your needs. If you're not into 3D printing, you could also have like your models printed for you at a service. There's like, shapeways or craft cloud or proto-labs or best like tons of these services out there. And in a variety of materials, as in they would even print, have a center printer to return a metal, real metal thing back to you. Well, they're printing houses with 3D prints in there. Absolutely. And a lot more in there, of course, experimenting with 3D printing in space. That being one of the most useful tools because if something breaks up there in the space station or beyond, they will be able to construct that right away on demand and fit it in. So that could be life-saving if it's sort of an oxygen leak or something. So I know that there's a lot of work being done on 3D printing in space, which has different characteristics, obviously in zero gravity. Speaking of speeds, here is how fast this thing is. If you look at the speed, this is real time on the screen right now. That is pretty quick. And the detail, again, this is the rubber ducky. This is a close-up of the rubber ducky. Again, this is a quarter of an inch, maybe, in size. You can see the layer lines if you look closely. There you go. But if you compare that with the actual size of it, it's hardly visible. So we're looking at something that has changed dramatically over the last, I don't know, 10 years, maybe. And I haven't really looked in 10 years. It's kind of a bit of a surprise to me how it has taken a jump, especially with this specific printer. Again, it's right now, many people say that's the one you want to get if you want to get started. And it's very low. So you could see in 10 years, on-demand printing desktop, in whatever materials you want, a kind of liquid wood which exists, or a metal, hard. Even I'm going to assume some kind of liquid stone that dries like soapstone, some kind of liquid concrete that hardens. I could see the technology moving forward like that so that materials are not a constraint, but more like a film style where you would select the material for the object you're printing and be able to do it at home, which I think would be an absolute gift for hobbyists, but also for artists. I mean, I can see the - Of course. And the whole scene with the download sites and the things is one thing, but of course, if you want to get more involved, you could use something like a free CAD application, like Tinkercad in your browser even. You don't even have to install anything or free CAD or soft space or whatever. There's a lot of different pieces of software out there where you can design your own 3D models. That will be a bit more involved, but the world is open to you. With the AI-generated 3D geometries, that is going to be even simpler in the future. So we're looking at something really interesting. Now, let's talk photography because how is this related to photography? And I went online to, in this case, Thingiverse, which is one of those websites where you can find a whole bunch of - we bring this on the screen where you can find a whole bunch of 3D models of - including everything, basic trinkets that might be like great at collecting dust on your shelves to really useful things like, I don't know, a GoPro mount, for example, for a specific purpose that you can't easily buy. Or we can think of lens hoods or lens adapters. Even that they are precise enough now that you can adapt your old Russian lens to your new fangled mirrorless camera where you can't find a proper adapter. Or a specific shape of a flash diffuser, for example. You can have translucent materials, so it's easy to make or camera grips. Or pinholes. Or pinholes. Monica has - Monica shoots with a Pentec 6.7 and a participant on a workshop brought her a 3D printed, high quality 3D printed grip like to hold it - easier to hold it in your hand. I've seen tripod plates. I've seen printed in a software rubber material like light seal replacements fit for a specific camera. Like, if you have an old camera and the light seal disintegrates, which sometimes they do, you could print that. Or let's say you have a brownie and you need a spool for it that you can't easily get, so you could print one of those. Or - let me enter camera in here just to give you an idea of what the things are that you can find here. Lenscap holders - a foldable tripod. Print your own. Actual cameras. You can find actual cameras in here. Let's see. Or let's say pinhole camera. If you put in pinhole, there's your pinhole cameras. All different sizes, all different here. Here's your stereo pinhole camera. - Can you print it? - A stereo pinhole. That is a photo club. That is a very specific gang of nerds. - Of course it is. And the visual on our screen. This looks very coarse compared to what is now possible with these printers. The print lines you see here, you wouldn't see those with a modern printer. But yeah, why not make an anamorphic pinhole photo with a 3D print camera? - It's as good as there. It is amazing the things you can - I'm just starting to think of the things that I might be able to do with this thing. And very often where I would go and try to find something specific somewhere on Amazon or somewhere else. And I'd spend, I don't know, half an hour trying to find the right thing that fits my need. That might be just a couple clicks away and an hour later it's printed. - Yeah, is there software that will slice and dice and add joining capacity to those? There must be. - In which way do you mean? - For example, let's say I'm just going to print a large cube just for example, simple. But I can only print say seven inches. So I have the cube, there it is in CAD, whatever I'm using. And I go I want to print this in seven inches, let's say it's 21 inches across so I can make a division and then feed it in but have the external raw. So you say you can print six inches with a one inch slider. So you just do that and have the software make it precise, female male, and be able to join it with no problem and do that online or on software. - You do this in your software, there is a function to slice something into smaller pieces and to add the pegs and the holes to make it fit again. That happens automatically. And this is a small printer, seven inches squared as a build volume. If you spend 100 bucks more, you have a much bigger print volume with a bigger printer. So it really depends on what you need. But this is the entry. - How much disk space does it take? - Let me bring the picture back. That's how much it takes. Let me find, okay, this is it with a with a with a color changer, you don't need that. This is it with just just a printer in by itself. It comes with a little thing where you hang the filament spool to its side, so it's connected to it. I don't know, 30, 40 centimeters squared, how much is that? 40 centimeters, 15 inches squared, possibly. - Wow, it's not huge. - It's small, it's not huge. - Practically a party favor. - Sort of, sort of. And again, the multi-color printing is printing multiple colors with a color changer will drastically extend the print time because on the same layer, if you have multiple colors, it needs to change the filament. It's a whole ordeal that the machine does automatically, but it adds a substantial print time. So, printing something like this, like this map here with the different colors for different for water and the mountains and so on, that would probably be an overnight print. - Yeah, I mean, that heart comes back to, you know, a couple of years ago, and we did an episode, and I discussed taking kind of images offline of satellite photos of mountain ranges that had been converted to very realistic bump maps, height maps, which I imported and then transfer them to Unreal Engine, built a model with Unreal of the Rocky Mountains, exported it as an SVG file. I had a printing shop printed for me with as much detail as possible, and then I gold-leafed it, and as a sculpture, I was going to have it transformed into a bronze, but the factory went out of business in COVID, so I did not do that. But that's another way of doing it. So, you're printing an object, the object then can be effectively, that's the unboxing, nice. The printing itself can be just one stage of creating a rubberized or whatever they use for lost wax. All of those things to keep stepping up the materials, so there's, you know, wow, that looks fabulous. Again, I have refrained from getting a 3D printer just for fear of it being a massive rabbit hole, taking up all my time because I need to study, to learn, to be able to do all these things, and that is just not the case with this thing. That's the fun thing. It really is a plug-and-play thing. So, for me, that's... Yeah. Do you need one of those little chambers that's in back of him or no? Just printing it. It's on the desk. It doesn't print... Some materials will need like an enclosure because you would have a higher temperature for ABS printing or something. It doesn't do that. It prints, again, some basic materials that are... I printed a little rod to connect something, and I tried to snap it in half with my hands. I couldn't. So, those materials are tough, or tough enough for most applications. So, yeah, that's my little recommendation. And if you are inclined to make things, then that is probably a good thing to at least look at. It looks really fun. That's my main number one thing. It looks like fun. Yeah, it is. And I haven't spent a lot of time fiddling. That's the nice thing. So, there you go. That is my little recommendation. So, there's an example of a technology that is not only useful but inspirational. So, the thing is sitting there staring at you and you go, "What can I do with it? How can I use it to push the boundaries of it? How can I transform a 3D model that I picked up online to something extraordinary? How I can blend things? How I can make a toy for a child? Or even build something bigger with pieces of it, the Lego universe or the log universe, where you're printing... What were those called? Those something logs? Some people will remember where kids used to get a chest of logs and they could build a log cabin or a big building. The bigger ones, we had them here, the Legos were the small ones and the bigger ones were called Duplos. Something like that. But you could do your own. Like a mechano set of old where you print out all of the pieces and then you actually build it. I think these are really, really fun things and very inspirational and I'd say really good for kids. Yes, and of course, the whole integration with photography, again, the things I listed now were mostly like accessories to your camera and so on. But you used it for art as in you printed those little landscapes and then made mold of that and then used and filled it with bronze and then took that again. So there are endless possibilities. Well, if I took a photo, just a simple photo and created a bump map, whether I'm using layupics, which we've talked about, or Photoshop. I mean, there's multiple ways of creating depth. So this is a, well, not a three dimensional piece. It may be two dimensional that has a protrusion of 3D, if you know what I mean. So it's not 360, but let's say 180. And then, so I have a photograph, I take a bump map of it or make a bump map. And then I create an SVG and I have a framed picture of something coming out of the picture printed on. Here is something that's called a lithofane, which is exactly that. We're talking about a printed picture with the dark parts being thicker than the bright parts and it's translucent. And then you can put it in front of a window or something and end up with a translucent thing with which only reveals itself when light shines through it. So there you go. It's just a yet another lithofane that's a new term, right? Lovely. And the printers, as you can see, can capture a lot of detail in these things. So there's a fusion of their technology, new tools will inevitably yield new kinds of art, new approaches to making art. As it always has, I mean, you know, we can go back to the Flemish, right, who really perfected oil paint and weaving. So you had canvas and a viscous paint that was easily manipulated on that canvas. In 1600 and boom, you have Flemish painting, a sense of new realism. That was all technology-based in Holland. They were very focused on science and development of technologies and that yielded amazing new art. So always when materials kind of emerge and science allows the kind of development of materials that inevitably, you know, creates a condition to make amazing, abstracted, or realistic, or kind of pushing the limits of what art can be. But because it doesn't exist in a vacuum. True. So this is exciting, I think. Inexpensive tabletop printer. Yup, absolutely. So there you go. Here's your new toy. My pick of the week is, of course, then the website where you can buy it. Again, not sponsored. We're not getting anything for that. They show that. Wish we were. It's bambolab.com, B-A-M-B-U-L-A-B dot com, and it's the go-to right now. So that is my pick of the week. And what did you bring us? My pick of the week is a chroma. These are cameras. If you could visit this particular site, they make all manner of cameras. They don't say specifically, but I do believe these are all 3D printed. I'm pretty sure. So there's a 4x5 just looking at the pictures. It looks as if it was 3D printed, for sure. Again, it's not a blemish. It's the way to manufacture things these days, especially small runs of things. That's the interesting thing. You can manufacture like five or something, or one of something doing it. It's on demand. I mean, they just say one to two weeks, right, so that you order it and they print it. And there's all kinds of cameras that are very specific from pinholes, 35 millimeter, 120 with lens adapters, galore. This is one. Really, it's a nice little rabbit hole chroma, and they have all kinds of filter adapters, and stumble across it, and just was quite dazzled by the innovation of something simple. And yet you see relatively, I say relatively inexpensive, for a wide camera. This is sort of a Linhof. Yeah, it takes a lot of like, it takes skill to design something like that and make it work, especially with an existing lens, because that is a lens that is not 3D printed, even though you probably could print the exterior of the lens, and build it. But this is a Schneider-Coitz-Nachlands that will certainly have great image quality. Well, if you remember, telescopes were invented in 1608, again, back to Holland, Lipschay, I think one. And he was a lens grinder, right? He did lenses for all kinds of things, and he had an idea to grind a convex and concave lens, put them in a tube, and all of a sudden, whoa, the moon was in his face, and that's how astronomy was born, really, and just a shameless plug, all based on my new work and my new show that's coming up in a month. There we go. July 13th here, my solo show. But those kinds of innovations of just going, well, I have a lens here from an old camera. I took out the glass, and I have another one, and I want to mount them so that they stay sharp, or they're either fixed focus, or even adjustable focus, and experiment with kind of spare parts in creating new looks, new forms, and an exploration of photography. And you take the kind of old-school manufacturing using those kind of parts, and you add that to some of the more exciting digital capture available for us, and you can get some things that have never been seen before. So that's exciting. So if anyone, any one of our listeners has experience with that, or is planning to do that, and let's see them. Join our Discord. Let's see what you have done, or what you will do, or what your plans are. I'd love to discuss a few of these things. And on our Discord, we have a different channels for different parts of that, like a tech channel, and an arts channel, and a showcase channel, and so on. So that would probably be the right place. All right, let me cue the outroom music. So the third dimension, the different thing. I'm really excited about this this new. I thought I would call it like a toy, but it's more than a toy. That's the thing. I used to call these things toys, but it's not. It's a tool that you approach with the excitement of a child who opens that toy. And then you end up with cool stuff and new possibilities. All right, we'll be back soon, everyone. Take care and see you in a week. Bye now. You've been listening to The Future of Photography. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your other podcasts. Find the show notes and more information at thefutureofphotography.com. [Music]
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