Small Fires
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
Inspiration is a funny thing. I’ve heard of all sorts of ways that folks come across it. Sometimes it’s through a strict process like the guy that came up with the Million Dollar Homepage, I met him once at a company bash and he talked through his process. He would sit down at the same time every week for a set period of time and throw around ideas to pay off his student debt.
Then there are the times like today that I am writing a newsletter and as I’m trying to work out how to tie together some ideas, along comes this interview with Hideo Kojima, legendary game designer, via a social media feed. Here, he’s following on from discussing his family and what he calls “the loop of life”.
You’ve talked about passing the baton in the loop of life. How do you want Hideo Kojima to be remembered when you pass it on?
I am not going to pass the baton to anyone. I will rather crush the baton… [Laughs.] I don’t need to give “Hideo Kojima” to anyone. If I pass the baton to my staff and tell them to make things the same way I do, the company will not succeed and will go out of business.
What do you mean by that?
Every day, if I tweet something that I like, a director or an actor or a musician contacts me. They say, “I’m a creator because of your games.” But they didn’t receive the baton of Hideo Kojima. They received my small fire. They’re not copying me. They’re not trying to be me. They have this fire, and they light up their own. And they’ll probably give that to someone else. There were legendary comic book artists when I was a boy. I didn’t become a comic book artist – I was inspired by them, I was influenced.
You took their small fire.
Exactly.
I liked that way of thinking about sharing ideas, so here I present a few embers that I came across this week.
Firstly, one that was sparked by a colleague who shared an image they had made in orbit! Space Selfie is a service that you can send an image to for free which in turn sends your image to a satellite. The satellite displays your picture on a screen, takes a picture of your picture with the Earth in the background and then sends that to you. It’s a fairly bonkers idea but seems to work as advertised, I love the incredible engineering that went into executing such a playful idea.
That got me thinking about other unusual places I’ve seen cameras over the years. This weekend my guest will be Summer Murdock, and she likes to shoot images in the water. As you’ll hear in the episode, she does so with fairly common or garden kit and in discussing it we talked about this fantastic waterproof enclosure for Polaroid cameras. Friend of the show Ben was brave enough to hop into the water to test out this beast of an enclosure with some friends. The water is a place an SX-70 should not be, but this enclosure makes it possible, and as you can see in Ben’s video, it gets results.
Like the water, the sky is no place for a Polaroid camera to travel unaccompanied but you can rely on humans to think up something they shouldn’t do, and do it anyway. This is a drone story, but not of sleek, refined, modern digital drones with amazing cameras. Rather ones which are analogue and shoot instant film. One such incredible creation is seen here on YouTube and made by Jason De Freitas. I love this, I would _never_ have thought to place a camera like this onto a drone.
How do you control it? How do you see even an approximation of what it’s seeing? How do you compensate for the exposure and perhaps most pressing of all, how do you compensate for the loss of a Polaroid camera if the drone doesn’t make it back? I do love the images he made with it though. Very cool.
Have an amazing week and may these and other embers perhaps become a small fire you take into your next project.