F1 fan Tim Binnion got to go to the Shanghai Grand Prix last month, and like most people lucky enough to see a race in person, he took a ton of photos. Thing is, amidst a sea of SLRs and iPhones, he took them on a Game Boy camera.




Having grown up without the pleasure of portable Nintendo gaming, Tim bought himself a Game Boy Color, complete with Game Boy Camera attachment, last Christmas. Before long he had noticed the work of people who were strapping the handheld’s camera peripheral to serious lenses like telescopes.

The complete kit, including camera, clip-on lens and bracket. Photo : Tim Binnion


With the Grand Prix coming up, he figured it might be fun to do something similar, only shooting the race. So he bought a clip-on smartphone lens, 3D-printed a bracket to hold it onto the Game Boy and picked up a custom dongle that would allow him to dump the images taken on the camera (its internal memory could only hold 30 shots) onto an SD card.



Photo : Tim Binnion

The Game Boy’s camera is obviously garbage, and entirely unsuited to taking photos of cars that are moving at breakneck speed, but Tim had the good fortune of getting a ticket that faced the exit of a hairpin turn, meaning he was right in front of the cars when they were going about as slow as they were going to go out on the track.

Their speed, combined with the clip-on lens, meant he managed to take some surprisingly decent photos of the race! So decent that they could have easily passed for screenshots from an old licensed F1 game from the early 90s.


Note that the best shots were those taken with the zoom lens on. Those without tended to be a 2-bit mess. I’ve shared some of the best of them below, but you can see his full gallery here.

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