Awesome Portraits and Landscapes, Shot With a Game Boy Camera

Photographer David Friedman reached back to the very origins of color photography to do the impossible—get the Game Boy Camera, a greyscale toy made by Nintendo, to shoot in color.

Nintendo launched the accessory for its black-and-white Game Boy portable game machine in 1998, right between the PalmPilot in 1997 and Polaroid’s novelty sticker-film I-Zone camera in 1999. It was an amusing add-on unlikely to attract serious gamers, who at that point almost certainly were obsessed with GoldenEye 007. And no one would expect it to attract a serious photographer.

“When the Game Boy Camera came out, I was already shooting professionally using high-end digital cameras that used the state of the art,” said Friedman. “I was a staff photographer at Christie’s auction house, and I was going into the studio using cameras that cost well into the mid-five figures.”

Game Boy Camera came to market alongside popular digital cameras from the likes of Olympus. But the consumer cameras of the day, with 1 to 2 megapixel resolutions, were no match for film. “I wasn’t really happy with the image quality of most of them,” said Friedman. “They were too expensive, they weren’t something handy, and they weren’t something I wanted to use for my personal photography.”

So in 2000, Friedman, who has an inventive streak and love of gadgets, decided to see how far he might push the envelope of the Game Boy Camera, a device that didn’t have much envelope to begin with.

“It had some rudimentary editing ability,” said Friedman. “You could put googly eyes on people.”

Game Boy Camera could connect to Game Boy Printer and print miniature stickers of its images. Friedman wasn’t interested in decorating a Trapper Keeper with tiny pics of his BFFs, but he was interested in the device’s port, which could send data. He found a third-party peripheral that could connect the Game Boy Camera to the serial port on his Y2K-era computer.

Viewing the images on his monitor, Friedman discovered that although the Game Boy’s cheap screen displayed the Camera’s images with a distinctive (and unappealing) greenish tint, the darkest and brightest of the Camera’s four tones were black and white. With the ability to move images to a computer, Friedman had a retro-cool alternative to the grainy consumer digital cameras available at the time.

Photographer David Friedman. David Friedman

Friedman started taking portraits of friends and snapshots from around New York. High-contrast subjects with discrete lines worked best. The low-res images made New York resemble a series of Nintendo game title screens, but Friedman was focused on the particularities of the camera’s performance.

Trees, for example, weren’t very well represented at the Game Boy Camera’s resolution. But other images, like a subway car in motion, were surprisingly successful.

“You’re seeing the effect of the camera sensor reading the image from bottom to top,” Friedman said. “Because the subway was moving by quickly, by the time the camera sensor had finished reading the image on one line, the subway had moved a little bit, then a little bit more, so it creates this distorted effect when it’s all put together.”

Friedman realized that image processing software would allow him to emulate one aspect of the professional-quality cameras he used at work, and produce color images. “The best digital camera you could get for catalog work was actually a grayscale sensor,” he said. “You would set up your photo and you would actually take three pictures. There was a color wheel mounted to the front of the camera, and a motor that would synchronize with the software that would run the camera.”

The color wheel would alternate between red, green, and blue filters, and the software used the resulting monochrome images as three channels to create a composite color image.

Using color gels, Friedman captured (L-R) red, green and blue images, then combined them to create the first color Game Boy Camera photograph (far right). David Friedman

“Every day for years I was going to work shooting with a three-pass camera, and when I got the Game Boy Camera I thought the exact same principles could be applied,” he said.

“It’s actually the same principle behind the first color photography,” Friedman said, referring to the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who took stunning full-color photos of turn-of-the-century Russia using a series of colored glass plates.

For his homemade three-pass camera, Friedman used simple scraps of color gel. When his first experiments didn’t pan out, he suspected that the grayscale sensor was sensitive to infrared light, distorting the images. So he bought a hot mirror filter, which blocks infrared light. It was designed to screw onto a camera lens, but Friedman simply taped it in front of his Game Boy Camera’s. That did the trick.

If you want to try this at home, the sticking point is finding a way to connect the Game Boy Camera to a computer. Friedman gave away his adapter a long time ago, because he no longer owned a computer with a serial port. The adapters are hard to find today, although at least one photographer seems to have uncovered one. You might also take a crack at building one using this diagram.

Friedman said his fascination with invention has only grown since the Game Boy Camera project. Since 2008, he has been interviewing, photographing and filming inventors, from Ralph Baer, inventor of home videogames, to Bob Butt, inventor of the Long Island iced tea.

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Awesome Portraits and Landscapes, Shot With a Game Boy Camera

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