F1 Fan Photographs Chinese Grand Prix With Game Boy Camera From 1998

One serious Nintendo fan has hacked a Game Boy to produce some seriously cool images of a recent Formula One race. Tim Binnion is a die-hard F1 fan and was lucky enough to get a ticket to the Shanghai Grand Prix last month.

The Australian amateur photographer wanted to capture the special day but thought he could do something more interesting than snapping away with this smartphone. Binnion is also a big Nintendo fan and for Christmas last year gave himself the gist he had always wanted as a young boy: The 1998 Game Boy Color, with the Game Boy Camera attachment.

The GameBoy camera has just 0.016 Megapixels, at the time of its release it was the world's smallest digital camera. Binnion soon started to see the Game Boy’s camera being used in a variety of interesting ways by people and thought he could do something similar himself.

Binnion decided the camera needed a little help, so purchased an inexpensive clip-on smartphone lens. He then put his product designing skills to use by designing a bracket that would attach the lens to the camera.

He got his design 3D printed in SLA resin using Taobao. Finally, he added a custom dongle that would allow him to send the pictures taken on the camera to an SD card.

Grainy pics look like screenshots from a classic game

This was necessary as the camera’s internal memory only holds 30 shots. Luckily Binnion had a ticket that seated him very close to the exit of a hairpin tune, so the cars in front of him were going as slow as they would the entire race.

This lack of speed and great positioning allowed Binnion to capture some amazing footage of the cars using the clip on lens.

The resulting images look like screenshots from an F1 game from the 90s.

You can see the entire gallery of images here. It’s clear the clip on lense made the quality of the pictures workable.

Binnion also took some great images of the general atmosphere of the event.

He explains his process and camera set up in a Reddit post.

GameBoy plus telescope redefines astrophotography

Other impressive photography using the GameBoy Colour camera include the work of Astrophotographer Alexander Pietrow who recently photographed the Moon and Jupiter using a Gameboy camera strapped to a telescope.

“I wondered if it would be possible to do astrophotography with this camera,” Pietrow writes. “Searching the internet I was surprised that nobody had tried this before and decided to give it a go.”

Pietrow strapped the GameBoy to the 1838 6″ Fraunhofer telescope in Leiden University’s Old Observatory. He then waited for the clouds to part and started snapping. The images of the moon are really astounding with the craters on its surface clearly visible. Pietrow then trained the telescope of Jupiter and was able to even capture some of the planet’s moons in his images.