Cameras that once saw things, hung up on the line to dry. Mind the safelight.
Safelight on · Do not open doorCamera obscura is Latin for “dark room.” This one is lit only by the red bulb above. Every print on the line was taken of a camera, not by one, and each develops as you reach it. Labels record only what is printed on the machines themselves.
The plain old point, focus and click. One frame at a time, no peeking until the film comes back.
A rangefinder: you focus by lining up a ghostly double image in the little window, no mirror box involved. Lurking behind it, an old Polaroid Land camera and a leather case, waiting for their own turn on the line.
The impatient end of photography. Press the button, and the picture comes out of the camera to develop in your hand, no darkroom required. (We keep the darkroom anyway, for atmosphere.)
The SX-70 folds flat when it’s done. The gold honeycomb disc is the “sonar”: it chirps to measure the distance and focuses itself. A camera that echolocates. Naturally it lives here.
Four lenses staring back like a spider’s eyes, made for little portraits several to a sheet. Rigged up on a tripod with a Sunpak flash for company.
The fine print on the box warns of a caustic jelly. Every good mystery needs a mysterious substance. Film canisters stacked alongside like evidence jars.
Built for small hands and big ideas. Plastic, chunky, practically unbreakable. Its blockier, pixelated Fisher-Price cousin is filed under Moving Pictures.
A pink rubber bumper, a lens ring the size of a cookie, a cord to keep it from wandering off. Real 35mm film inside, so whatever it photographed, it photographed for real.
Cameras that refuse to sit still: one that flies, one that drives over rocks, one held steady on a gimbal, and one that once recorded pictures onto an audio cassette.
The flying camera, folded up like a bat at rest and tucked into its foam coffin alongside its controller and spare battery.
see also the drone at rest in the Flight Deck hangar →
A rock crawler wearing a camera on its roll cage like a periscope. Spare tire on the back, for emergencies of a rocky nature.
The crawler again, now carrying an action camera on a stabilizing gimbal: a ground-level camera dolly that goes where tripods fear to tread.
The motors in the gimbal fight every wobble, so the camera floats level while the hand below shakes. Very handy when being chased.
The Pixelvision camcorder: a toy that recorded grainy black-and-white video onto ordinary audio cassettes. The blocky, ghostly look it makes is a Shaw Manor aesthetic all on its own.
A pilgrimage. This room is named after the oldest trick in photography, so of course Shaggy went to see a real one.
The sign over the Camera Obscura in Santa Monica, California, photographed by Shaggy on his visit. Same idea as this room: a dark chamber, a lens, and the world outside painted on the wall.
The negatives are here. The real stories are still in the canister, so the darkroom staff has been talking.
None of this has been developed into fact. The prints stay on the line and the safelight stays on.