💕 sugar | Photo Post: Playing With Non-Standard Cameras

I really enjoy taking photos of myself and fucking with them to make them look older, or just straight up taking photos of myself using older devices. Here’s a few I really liked:

(some of these alt texts were taken from my bluesky posts)

Gameboy Camera

I am actually emulating the Gameboy Camera on my 3DS because I never had a Gameboy Camera, but by using mGBA I can pass either the front or rear camera in to the game and take photos! It’s really easy and I believe the vibe remains intact. The draw for me here isn’t the specific lens that the GBCam uses, which I’m sure does differ drastically from the 3DS’, but the 2bit per pixel imagery, the heavily reliance on dithering, the overblown lights and the deep swallowing darks. These aspects come through whether emulated or done on actual hardware. One day I’d like to get my hands on a GBCam, but I don’t believe that day is anytime soon, so this will suffice for now :) I’d like to try some landscape shots with the GBCam too, but I’m worried too much detail would be lost. I might have to try to get some real close shots of things like flowers instead?
Selfie of me taken via a Gameboy Camera emulated on 3DS (thus using the 3DS' inward facing camera). It is very low resolution and heavily relies on dithering to make the image look legible. Monochrome. The darks and lights are extremely exaggerated. Same style photo as the previous, but it's in profile and I'm smiling :)

Modified Phone Images

These are images I took with my Pixel 6 smartphone and edited using either Paint.NET or some photo editor software on my phone (I forget the name and can’t be arsed to look it up). The appeal here is just fucking around and seeing what I like. The intentional artifacting is really pretty and I love that it can be a style choice nowadays rather than a necessary compromise.

I took this one when my collar came in and played around with it as a bit of a teaser for social media. The next day I posted some spicier ones without editing, but I always keep coming back to this one! I really like the shadows on my chest and the highlights on my arms and face. There’s something a bit cartoony about my eyes that I’m really digging too.

There’s the author image I use (which I really need to change I think, I’m just not as enamored with it as I once was; perhaps the one above?). This was one of my earlier forays into intentional artifacting and I really love the way it turned out, especially with the pink colors popping up in my otherwise grey hair.
low resolution and low-color headshot of me in a pink sweater that is hanging off my shoulder. this image features some jpeg artifacting that causes weird colors to pop up, like some pink in my hair

And of course there’s this fun one that I posted before. The real chunky blocks here introduce a ton of vagueness, which I think adds some mystery to the sex appeal.
A very low resolution and low color photo of naked sugar from her side. This one is extremely blocky.

Nintendo 3DS

I love taking photos using my New Nintendo 3DS XL’s front or rear facing cameras. I super dug into this when I was at SGDQ this year. Beyond just taking selfies, which I did take a lot of, it was a ton of fun to take outdoor shots and pics of the venue space. I really love the old digital camera / web cam feel of these images. The whole 640x480ness of it, the overblown lights, the lack of focus or detail. It’s really fun and takes me back. This is definitely one device I intend to regularly use for photography. I should go on a photo walk one of these days with my 3DS. The fun thing about taking photos using the rear cameras – yes there’s two rear cameras, for three total cameras! – is that they take 3D photos. So far I can, of course, only view them on my 3DS.. but it’s still a neat artifact!
Blurry photo taken on a 3ds of my chest, one boob is fully visible while the other is covered by my shirt which is around my arms. My face is in frame but mostly obscured by my own hair. There is a tastefully placed emoji over my nipple. A shot of the lounge and bar at the SGDQ 2026 hotel in Minneapolis. The photograph is taken from the mezzanine level and you can see a few more balcony-type out-croppings. Below at the bar are people seated eating and drinking, and behind them are more people at tables. They are framed on the left by some pillars.

PlayStation Vita

The Vita also has front and rear cameras and I have played around with these too! I love these even though they feel a lot like the 3DS photos. There’s a different kind of graininess to them at times, though I would not be especially surprised to find out that the cameras are basically the same as the 3DS’. But given just how same they are, I probably will not be using this for much more photography. The shots I took below were before I picked up the n3DSXL I used above (I have an o3DSXL, but it’s been broken for easily a decade now and I’ve never repaired it).
A selfie of me laying down in bed, hair around my face. My lips are a bit pursed because I'm wearing my nightguard. Selfie of me standing in my old bedroom wearing a pink Kirby sweater and smiling, my hair is almost covering half of my face.