Over the past few months, I’ve been working on refining my editing process for my Gameboy Camera images, coming up with ways to recolorize them in Photoshop with independent pixel-based selections and digging deeper into creating photo-accurate gradients to define the individual two-bit colorized regions. It’s been fun designing a whole new editing workflow for these diminutive images that is vastly different than my traditional work.

When I first started shooting with my Gameboy, I kept true to the sickly green color palate that best approximated the screen color of the original Gameboy, given that the images are dumped to my SD card as black and white bitmap images. Edits were limited to eliminating the distracting Nintendo branding around the edges, but the more that I shot and investigated what the rest of the community was doing with these toy cameras, I started dabbling in colorizing my images. Folks were already creating tricolor images using stacked images and filters, shooting video, as well as a wide array of other amazing creative manipulations. My first colorized images were with different two-bit gradients and then with crude selections to color separate subjects that wouldn’t otherwise visually separate due to the limited contrast provided by two bits worth of tonal range. After about a year or so, I started refining my selections by creating them on the original 128×128 image and only after all the variety of selections were saved and created, I would increase the image size. This greatly refined the edges on my selections, making them pixel-perfect.

Last week, while playing around with multiple layers, I stumbled upon a method of creating a faux-3D look to the pixels of an image, adding a slight bas relief look to the subject. Reminiscent of Voxels, or perhaps adding single blocks to a flat Lego board to accentuate contrast, this method adds a topography to images when viewed closely, yet it only barely impacts the image from a distance, allowing you to still blend the pixels into recognizable shapes. Today, I spent a good portion of the day manipulating a variety of images and I’ve come up with a pretty simple method to create this voxel effect.

Now, the real question is whether it adds anything to the interpretation / experience of the image. I’ve been aware since I first started playing with these images that there was an optimal viewing distance that allowed the image to remain pixelated yet physically discernible as a photographed subject. Printing these images to any significant size made the viewing distance trail off farther and farther away from the piece, requiring the viewer to back up to dissect it. As well, printing large makes the image feel even more flat than when it’s digitally presented on your monitor or phone screen, and after printing one 12” square and framing it, I grew hesitant that anything larger than postcard size would work. However, this voxel / bas relief effect not only pronounces the individual pixel, but it gives the viewer something to appreciate the closer they get – adding depth to these images adds substance to the images no matter where they’re viewed. The pixelated structure of the image has become a topographic map of this particular memory, this place, this moment in time. Pulling back, one sees the general gist of the memory captured, but digging deeper, there lies the complexity of 14 kilopixels of data, of memory, of moments, stored.

Maybe I’m getting closer to a defined project with these toy cameras. Either way, I’m certainly having fun blending my interests, that of photography, retro gaming, and technology, into one project.

Thoughts? Feel free to share below.