Small World Speaks

It shows the inside of a printer. It shows it while it’s printing. It’s kind of like a frozen frame of it. At the top, you can see the ink cartridge with the little dots in the middle. Then, you can see the paper at the bottom.
I tend to try to use everyday objects. The thing that started it all; curiosity to see what things look like. I try to show them in a way that makes them more interesting.

We take so much for granted that a printer works itself. We’re always like, ‘Oh, it’s not working’. The ink is splattering, and we have to change the cartridge, or the paper is stuffed up. But, if you really look at it, it’s crazy how fast this thing moves back and forth and then simultaneously shoots these little droplets down on the paper and they land super precise on the points. I thought that was really fascinating and overlooked, in a sense.

It makes you understand the world around you a bit better, and I think that is somehow nice and interesting in itself.
No, I don’t use any AI in my videos or images.  The advantage that I have is that I have some of the nice equipment and I want to use it for the fun stuff that you typically wouldn’t use it for.

I didn’t know about the printer. I thought, ok, I just take my camera, shove it into the printer, and just take the image. But, the print head moves very fast. With a microscope lens, it’s very difficult to keep something in focus. I tried to reverse-engineer it to then use a handheld printer that you use to print onto stuff. I used that technique to build a setup where instead of the print head moving over the paper, the paper moved below the print head. In that way I could have the print nozzles in place and stay in focus, but they shoot out of the nozzles super fast.

When I set my camera to max shutter speed, 1/8000s of a second, they were still super blurry, and that was kind of a phase where I was, ok, how do I do that even now? I saw a video on ultra-high-speed photography. Instead of using the shutter speed on your camera, you essentially use the flash, and that kind of allowed me to then take images of something that was super fast. 

In the end, I just needed to set it up correctly. I thought I needed something expensive. I already had everything I needed. I think that is something that makes this image, for me,  very special because I learned something out of it.