Fun and Games with a Circuit-bent Toy Digital Camera, 16 February 2024

Fun and Games with a Circuit-bent Toy Digital Camera, 16 February 2024

Circuit bending a digital camera is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Snag is, whenever I get myself a cheap little digicam I find that I become so attached to it that I can't bring myself to open it up and potentially ruin it forever.

Then, the other day over on the 'Gram I came across a post by Pedro at Freedom Enterprise, a company in Portugal that specialises in making devices for circuit bending and glitch art. He had just taken delivery of three toy digicams, you know those little plastic toy cameras for kids, and he was circuit bending them! Naturally, I snapped one up and a few days later I finally had my first circuit bent digital camera. 

After charging it for a while I clamped the camera onto my little travel tripod and headed across the road to photograph my favourite well and orange trees that I always use to test out a new camera. The first image taken, of course, was with no adjustments or filters, and the trees came out distorted with a lovely shade of pink.

Toggling through the filters I discovered that it has a black and white mode, so held the Hoya 720nm Infrared filter over the lens, and also took images with red, green and blue filters to see if I could create a digital aerochrome, one of my favourite techniques. 

The infrared sensitivity of the little toy camera was quite impressive, although of course it was hugely distorted compared to 'regular' cameras. Back home I turned the three filtered black and white images into a trippy-looking trichrome, and even managed to create a psychedelic digital aerochrome from the infrared image. 

For a bit of fun I also took filtered images with the toy camera in 'normal' colour mode and made a digital aerochrome of that. 

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