This Guy Mounted a 70-200mm Lens on His Game Boy Camera for Portraits

Sam McKenzie from the YouTube channel 3D Printor recently embarked on a fun project. Using a 3D printed adapter he found on Thingiverse, he modded a classic Game Boy Camera, shot portraits using a 70-200mm lens (approximately 3000mm equivalent), and printed one of those portraits on canvas.

The setup itself was pretty straight forward: McKenzie simply printed the adapter, carefully took apart his Game Boy Camera, and attached the new “lens mount” to the front. Then he went out and and shot some 0.1-megapixel portraits of a friend using one of his Tamron 70-200mm lenses:

What you don’t get to see in the video is the process of actually getting the photo off of the Game Boy, which required a bit of a work around.

“The Super Game Boy for SNES allows you to play Game Boy games on your TV,” explains McKenzie. “[So] I used an old VHS to DVD making software and USB capture card I had from the early days of DVD and thankfully it worked with the SNES.”

Then, after modifying the image a tiny bit so that the Nintendo and Game Boy logos wouldn’t spill off the canvas, he received the final print:

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this, nor is it the most extreme version.

We first saw an EF lens mount for the GB camera in 2018, and this guy photographed a Formula 1 race using just a Game Boy camera and a different mod before that. If you really wanna see an extreme set up, check out this post about the guy who attached his Game Boy Camera to a telescope to (literally) shoot the moon.

Still, this might be a first in its own right: shooting a “creamy retro portrait” using a Game Boy Camera and a 70-200mm lens, and then printing the results on canvas. Check out the full BTS video up top to see how it all came together.


Image credits: Photos by Sam McKenzie and used with permission.

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