Living in New York City, rarely does a day go by where I don’t get tangled in a crowd of tourist photographing the eclectic skyline, the statues of Central Park, or the out-stretched Brooklyn Bridge. I’ve often imagined each individual photo as the same as any other, taken by different individuals, but through the same lens, creating an over-saturation of touristy photographs that have been taken in the exact same manner over a thousand times before. That’s why Interaction Design student Philipp Schmitt has produced the Camera Restricta, a 3D printed camera case made to utilize the iPhone, to offer photographers a guide to originality and deny the snapping of photos that have already been taken from every angle you could imagine.
The 3D printed shell is built to enclose an iPhone, an ATtiny85 microcontroller, and electronics that work to raise and lower the shutter button when needed. The camera operates by using the iPhone GPS to locate photo location data through Flickr and Panoramio; if too many pictures have been taken in a given location, the Camera Restricta will prevent you from taking a cliche photo. The 3D printed case is modern in design, and features a display screen that will tell you whether or not you are allowed to take photos in the relative area. If not, the shutter will retract until you reach a less photographed area.
The case also features an audible indicator of the amount of geotagged photos taken; a series of clicks are produced from the Camera Restricta, which grows more intensely as a popularly photographed draws near. The phone is run on a custom web app that queries an open source Node.js server built by Schmitt, which acquires the public photo location data and feeds it through the Camera Restricta. If the data shows too many photos in that particular area, the display screen on the 3D printed case will tell you exactly how many geotagged photos of the location exist and whether or not it will allow you to take a photo.
The camera is meant to lead photographers on a path towards refreshing originality, preventing them from taking overdone pictures of tourist traps and also potentially leading them to spots where no photos have ever been shared before. In a world where digital photography has given the world’s travelers an opportunity to take and share their pictures online, an endless stream of identical photos has been created, while originality has become easier to avoid. Schmitt’s Camera Restricta hopes to displace this redundancy by leading photographers away from all the tourist traps and into more undiscovered spots that have yet to be shared with the rest of the world.
