In Flight: March 2009

March 25, 2009

by Ethan Hulbert Posted in Vivitar

in flight

The beautiful cloudscape of the sky and a $10 digital camera from Walgreens (the Vivitar MARSCAM). 3/25/2009.

A lo-fi digital photo taken from an airplane window while still on the ground in 2009, shot with a Vivitar Marscam—a bare-bones toy camera powered by a single AAA battery. The photo is hazy and pixelated, with visible digital noise. In the frame, part of the aircraft’s wing juts in from the right side. On the tarmac below, a couple of service trucks sit parked on the wet concrete, which reflects light from the overcast sky. An orange traffic cone stands nearby, adding a splash of saturated color. The moisture on the pavement suggests recent rain or ongoing drizzle. The image has that charming, glitchy, low-res texture typical of early budget digital cameras.

take-off

An unintentionally surreal image caused by a sensor glitch or overload on the Vivitar Marscam when pointed directly at the sun. At the center is a sharp black dot with an intense, luminous purple outline—clearly not present to the human eye, but created by the camera’s inability to process the extreme brightness. The surrounding sky is washed out and vaguely gray-blue, offering no detail. This artificial “black sun” looks like a cosmic anomaly or a retro sci-fi special effect, highlighting the weirdness and unpredictability of ultra-cheap digital tech.

i shot the sun to see what would happen

Another glitchy solar image from the Marscam, where the sun has again been transformed into a strange artifact. A dense black orb with a glowing magenta or violet halo sits mid-frame, possibly surrounded by faint light flares or digital streaks. The shape looks unnatural and jagged at the edges, contrasting sharply against the flat, pale sky. The color distortion and pixel fringing give the photo a vaporwave-esque surrealism, despite being just a janky point-and-shoot mistake.

it overloads the little camera and creates a delightful error

A third photo of the sun taken from the airplane window using the Marscam, continuing the strange visual glitch theme. The sun is rendered again as a dark central dot surrounded by an electric purple corona, with less contrast than the others but similar color distortion. Background details are minimal, mostly a featureless blur of sky. These failed attempts to capture sunlight accidentally produce something more artistically weird than technically accurate—an unintended visual artifact from an obsolete toy camera in flight.

the camera does not preview photos, so i had no idea this happened until after

A rare self-portrait taken on the flight with the Vivitar Marscam, where the photographer (me, Ethan) turned the toy camera toward themselves. The result is a blurry, low-res image of a young person with light skin and dark-rimmed glasses, looking upward slightly toward the window light. Their face is mostly in shadow, softly lit from one side, with some facial detail visible despite the camera’s muddy pixelation. The lack of detail feels accidental but somehow intimate, like a forgotten webcam snapshot from a long-lost internet archive.

myself

A post-landing photo inside the airport (Minneapolis? Eau Claire?), taken with the Vivitar Marscam while walking through a hallway or gate area. The ceiling dominates the frame, with parallel silver-gray metal beams running across in regular intervals. The yellow-green lighting is industrial, casting a slightly cold glow on the otherwise drab structure. The photo has the flat, colorless tone of a place built for utility, not beauty. Blurring and compression are heavy, warping some of the structural lines and leaving artifacts across the image. It feels mundane but somehow haunting through the Marscam’s distorted lens.

post-landing

Comments are closed.

Image Descriptions