3D-printed Digital Camera Obscuras

thingiverse

In photography, it's usually the case that the larger the film or sensor, the better. Large-format film is a pain to deal with, but large-format sensors are extremely expensive. Fortunately, most of the properties of a large format sensor can be obtained by building a camera obscura that projects an image onto a relatively large screen, which we simply photograph using a small-sensor digital camera. Our particular obscura is of the rear projection type, which means that the obscura's lens and our digital camera are on opposite sides of the screen. This thing is a collection of parts for 3D-printed digital camera obscuras that use your compact digital camera (especially ones similar to the Canon PowerShot ELPH 180) or cell phone to capture the image projected on a large-format screen... and can cost less than $25 to make (including the lens). Such devices are often generically called depth-of-field adapters because they can produce images in which the subject is reasonably sharp, but everything behind, or in front of, the subject seems to melt away into a soft blur -- beautiful bokeh. This particular device is called **Faboky** (fah-bow-key), initially standing for **Fresnel Apodized Bokeh Obscura from KentuckY** -- because it can use a cheap Fresnel magnifier as the lens and use an apodizing filter to give more control over the appearance of the out-of-focus portions of the image. However, the reason there are so many parts here is because Faboky has *LOTS* of variations, including using conventional large-format lenses or even a pinhole. Thus, it might be better to think of it as being **Flexibly Adaptable Bokeh Obscura from KentuckY**. The first photo shows Faboky being used with a Samsung S20 Ultra and a conventional 4x5" format 135mm *f*/2.2 lens to obtain an image equivalent to a 32mm *f*/0.53 on a full-frame camera, and that image is shown in the second photo. The next four photos show some different versions of Faboky using Fresnel lenses, the 135mm *f*/2.2, and even a homemade pinhole. The most extreme version is the second Fresnel-lens version shown here, which behaves like a 23mm *f*/0.13 full-frame lens! In any case, it's a bit complex to explain how to pick which version of Faboky you want to make, which parts you'll need for that, and how to make everything into a working system. Thus, there's a companion Instructable that goes through all of that. **You should read the Instructable before making any of these parts.** That Instructable is https://www.instructables.com/3D-printed-Digital-Camera-Obscuras/ . All the parts needed for Faboky can be printed on a typical consumer FDM 3D printer, and a typical version requires less than 1000g of filament for all parts. However, some parts barely fit in the build volume of most printers, and total print time can be 24 hours or more.