It Was Hard Photographing The Eclipse With A Game Boy Camera

It Was Hard Photographing The Eclipse With A Game Boy Camera

Today in the US, the Sun was devoured by the Moon in an act of vore that the whole family could enjoy. Another thing the whole family once enjoyed: The Game Boy Camera.

Image credit: zhx.

Released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was a Game Boy game/peripheral that let you take grainy lo-fi pictures, add Pikachus to them, and even print them out if you had a Game Boy Printer. It was basically ad hoc Snapchat. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite take off and has since been consigned to the attic storage Tupperware container of history. Flash forward to today: One longtime Game Boy Camera owner, zhx, decided to photograph the eclipse with it. The result is certainly one of the more unique photos to come out of Eclipse-A-Palooza 2017.

Here’s the full, original photo:

I took a picture of the eclipse with my Gameboy Camera

The fact that it looks so nice is actually pretty serendipitous, zhx, who decided to grab their Game Boy on a whim, explained. “[It’s] not zoomed in,” they wrote on Reddit. “The sun itself is a very small part of the picture. The dark circle is just a crazy halo effect. No filter either. I didn’t even get a pair of glasses to look at it; had to kinda wing it.”

The process of getting the photo off the ancient Game Boy Camera and onto the internet, however, was An Ordeal. “I shot it on my backlit [Game Boy] DMG, then I used the Interact Mega Memory card on my [Game Boy] Pocket (the camera doesn’t fit in the DMG with the Mega Memory) and backed the SAV file up to the Mega Memory,” they said. “Then I plugged my USB 64M cart into the MM and restored the file to that, which I can then plug into my computer and retrieve.”

Don’t get the wrong impression, though: zhx won’t let inconvenience stop them from using the Game Boy Camera even further past its expiration date. “If I’m living my life right, I should still be shooting Game Boy Camera photos in 2024,” they said.


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