Game Boy Camera

This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.

I was inspired by Becca Farsace and her video this week about Funtography. I knew nothing about this genre, but Oleg and others are doing an amazing job of establishing a new genre of photos and modular gear to create it with. You can even process the images to make them colour if you have the right filters and a tripod.

For those not in the know, the Game Boy camera was released by Nintendo in 1998. It was a low resolution black and white camera add on to the Game Boy that could store around 30 images on the cartridge. These could also be printed if you bought the thermal printer add-on for the console. These days, folks are starting to mess with the GB Camera to see if they can make it do more. A replacement 3D printed housing can be purchased or printed, a non-destructive mod to the original hardware, and allows the mounting of different lenses and an infrared filter to improve clarity of images.

This is all relative of course, it’s still an automatic exposure that is slow to adapt to different lighting conditions, running on old hardware at an absurdly low resolution but playing with this setup attached to my Analogue Pocket as I traveled for work this week I’ve seen the power of a new perspective and it’s fun. I’ve found it a challenge in a good way to shoot some of my favourite subjects, sky and trees, using this new camera to see what detail I can actually realistically capture. It also comes at a time when I’m getting interested in self portraits thanks to a conversation with a future guest, Amy Elizabeth.

1998 called …

… they’d like their camera back xD

So I’m on the go and experimenting with something VERY vintage to see what I get.

What I’m getting so far is grainy in the extreme but super interesting and I can’t wait to do more with it. If you’re interested in self portraits then Amy has made a 30 day introduction PDF to the form. You can download it and see what you can make, 90s game console camera, an optional extra ;)