During the setup for the 2024 Pacific Bonsai Expo I saw a walled-off photography setup in the corner. At least, that’s what I thought it was, until I saw a second setup that I knew, for sure, was a photography setup. Now I wasn’t sure what the other thing was.
Before the bonsai were put up on the exhibit tables they were brought into this walled area. I wheeled in a tree, still mystified what this was all about, and stood there, watching.
Aaron Kupferman was there with a camera. He pointed it at the bonsai and slowly walked around it. Then he did another walk at a different height. Then another one up into the branches. Then down.
This baffled me.
What about the stuff around the bonsai, the chairs and whatnot? The cart? How was all that not going to be seen? And what was the product, anyhow?
I asked him.
“It’s a 3D image.”
Seeing my confused look, Aaron smiled and showed me a screen. On it was an image like a photo. I looked closer as he touched the screen and rotated the image. It was extraordinary, a squirrel-eyed view of a bonsai, as if the squirrel had scampered around and taken a ton of photos and later stitched them together. Not as a panorama, but as a little movie. That you could control with your fingers.
When I learned more about Aaron’s background this squirrel stuff became less mystifying. The special effects in movies and commercials have been Aaron’s world for years, including being the senior compositor for Dune: Part Two and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Take a look at this gob-smacker of a compilation of his past work in film.
Aaron says:
My day job is creating and supervising visual effects work for films, TV, and commercials. Visual effects is all of the computer work that we do on the footage after it is filmed.
Aaron took all this visual effects savvy to bonsai. On his new website 3D Bonsai are sample bonsai images that you can manipulate. The control over how you view a tree—the front, side, back, underneath branches, even from the top—and also how close in or how far away, is incredible.
I did find that like any digital image, by zooming out the image gets sharper, and that closer in it becomes blurry. But that is only very close in. In all, a fantastic tool. And fun.
Aaron explains:
I’ve been testing 3D scanning trees for a while, but a new type of scan has only recently gotten good enough for organic detailed subjects. It has the fun name of a Gaussian Splat. Instead of a typical 3D scan which tries to make a mesh with accompanying color maps that represents the object, it creates a cloud of points with each point having a color, size, and “smear” direction. This does a much better job of representing foliage, including needles, and other fine details. The other nice benefit of this technique is that you can easily separate the subject from the background by deleting the points everywhere else, aside from the subject itself. It does have some limitations, such as larger areas without much texture detail. Often times pots don’t scan well with this technique unless there’s some good surface detail.
After testing this on my trees and a few at the Huntington Gardens (where I volunteer) I decided the technology was good enough. While there is still room for improvement on many of the scans, I feel like these interactive scans are a great resource for studying these trees at their finest and enjoy them in ways you can’t with a flat photograph.
I have the sense that this may be the path forward for remote juries of bonsai shows. You can see the bonsai almost as well as if you were there. A great tool if you want to share the full experience of a bonsai—or as full as you can get without smelling or touching it—with someone from out of state, or another country.
Thanks, Aaron, for being patient with my befuddlement at the Expo. And for an eye-opening preview of what might be the future of bonsai imaging.
In addition to the free sample images, there is a paid sign-up to view the 74 trees of the Pacific Bonsai Expo on Aaron’s website. (He did this in partnership with the Expo team, and there is a link to donate to the new Expo nonprofit).