TEdADYNE Systems: Lithos'd

Technology goes round and around. Take our ways of capturing moments. From scratching lines on the ground or on a rock, to the great little cameras that almost everyone carries with them in their phone.

Leaving aside rock paintings (even though some of these were detailed and in proportion and even beautiful) We can see the first representations of real world scenes in sketches and paintings, frescos and tapestries. Styles of portraying the scenes varied, but there comes a point where painting a black blob and calling it "The MarketPlace On Saturday" is just not going to cut it. Also, I'm more interested in technological things rather than abstract mind experiments. So I'll stick to roughly the subject of photography.

Brief History Of Photography

History is full of camerae obscura which ranged from a pinhole in one wall of a room and some tracing paper on the wall opposite (Bonus Pratchett Moment: Now we know where Sir Terry Pratchett got his idea of the iconograph which Twoflower the tourist used to capture images on his travels. The gods are bastards!) to the large black boxes that early photographers carted laboriously about on their travels in efforts to capture (slow-moving or hopefully completely still for periods of up to several minutes depending on the medium being used to record the scene including imps with paintbrushes) landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.

Alphonse Giroux in 1839 built a technology business around the tech of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, from whom the Daguerrotype originated. This seems to be the earliest commercial camera available. (Had to include links to their Wikipedia entries, just look at Louis-Jaques' clothes and the way he must have managed to hold that pose for what? - ten to twenty minutes? Portraits were hard back then...)

The "Kodak Moment" (oh come on - you knew I'd have to use that in an article like this!) came when George Eastman produced imaging film on paper in 1885, then on nicely flammable celluloid the year after he introduced the first camera named Kodak for the general population. Kodak is still the first name many think of when you ask them about film based cameras.

But the original Kodak, despite being inexpensive enough for working people to afford, came with a gotcha. In an early case of flockintech, the Kodak was preloaded with enough film for 100 pictures, and then had to go back to the factory to have that film developed. I guess there weren't too many photo developing houses around then, but you have to wonder if that whole lock-in technology doesn't have at least one root tendril in the Eastman Company...

Most people can fill in the history here, from Kodak, to Instamatic, to Polaroid (the films of which you are strongly advised not to shake! Thank you Andre3000... 😂) to digital cameras in the 1990s onward, all the way to the device you're probably reading this on, or at least have sitting close by if using a larger device.

You can - now - get a hard copy of your image by sending it to a colour printer loaded with good inks and photo quality paper. Or you could actively refuse the convenience of a decent digital camera, personal assistant, information manager, web browser, and telephone - and choose a really feature-limited "instant print" style camera that either prints photos directly or by connecting it up to a matched photo printer.

But we're spoilt.

If you wanted a hard copy of an image in Kodak Eastman days you sent the camera away for developing. If you were around at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, you could send your film to a developing house or develop it yourself.

By 1947, Edwin Land demonstrated the first instant (almost instant) film and the Polaroid Land Camera, which developed the film for you in a minute. There were film cartridges you could send to be developed without needing a film changing bag, and finally in a full circle, "disposable" (actually I believe some brands of them were refilled and sold again, some refilled and given back to you for the cost of developing and refilling) cameras that you sent back to have the film developed.

So why would we in effect go back to the days of developing our own film?

Introducing: Too Much Technology

Greetings readers! Today I'm on the subject of lithophanes, those magical Polaroid moments that you only need a decent digital camera, some great art package, a lithophane generator, some nice pale filament, and a 3D printer! To (sort of, almost, depending on your skillz and your printer) instantly have a great picture to give away to friends or whatever. Which they can't see unless you give them a backlighted frame for it.

So what's the attraction? Aside from all those advantages above, lithophanes are actually fun. They were made up to a century ago, often in engraved ceramics, and later pressed in plastic. You can read about them here. I only ever got to see plastic ones, sucks to be me, I'd have loved to see a hand-engraved ceramic or two.

They can be lit by anything.

I made a few, and you can too. Take a digital photo with plenty of contrast. Lithophanes are actually a big step backwards in photo resolution and dynamic range, because they can only alter lightness in steps of one layer of 3D printing at a time, and most filament can only provide so much contrast - after a few layers, it's all dark unless you put some high power lighting behind the print. That said, with a good printer and good choice of filament transparency, good use of layers, you can also produce some quite detailed lithophanes.

Use the info above to pick your medium for taking the images and suddenly realise that your phone is well good enough to take the photo you think will work. I also use an art package (Paint.NET) to mess with making the image greyscale and adjusting brightness and contrast until it looks like it might work.

Then you need to convert it into a model you can put into your 3D printer. Most of it will ask you how thick you'll make the layers, and the thinner you can make them, the better, as you'll be able to print more levels of lightness before the plastic gets too thick.

Dennis Dane made a good litho tool, https://itslitho.com where you can try out a variety of various settings and see a rough idea of what it'll print like. Muck around with settings until you think it'll be decent, and download the file.

On your printer, the more translucent the filament you use, the more layers you'll be able to print before the light can't get through any more. That said, clear filament won't really work because you'll need too many layers. Most opaque filaments, you'll be working with only about six to ten steps of lightness. Some of the more opaque, you may only get three. This is where you'll spend a bit of time dialling in your filament, layer thickness, and even line width, to get the detail you want.

There's a good range of information on the ItsLitho site I linked above, and more at All3DP.

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