When I see something like this, I am once again nine years old, reading Harriett the Spy and creeping around my neighborhood with a notebook, peering into people’s windows.
The Super Secret Spy Lens is basically a periscope lens that lets you appear to be shooting straight ahead, when really you’re taking a photo of something to the side (or below, or above — it’s got a 360-degree swivel). Get it here.
If you had one of these, what would you use it for? Would you be the hero of your own spy story, getting the goods on a terrorist agent? A hard-boiled PI stalking a client’s cheating wife and falling hard for the wrong dame? A high school kid with a science project that accidentally records the only proof of a plot to kill the president? The possibilities are endless…
Enjoy your Thursday.
The closest I will get to this camera is if someone takes my picture. I have never been good at taking pictures. Spying is attractive, but it’s so easy to misinterpret what we see.
When I lived in southern Arizona, I wanted to sketch the birdwatchers that flocked to our little town each winter. With their gear and hats and excited gestures, they were as much fun to watch as the hummers, the vermilion flycatchers and the grey hawks. I’d sit on a bench in the sancutary to try to capture details of them as they passed; maybe I’d make a guidebook to birdwatchers, I thought. But I didn’t draw fast enough, or I got to distracted by the light in the cottonwood trees. But now I could voyage down south with this cool lens and take pictures of birdwatchers and have the further fun of them whipping out their binocs to try and see what I am photographing!
jean- birdwatcher watcher huh? Do they wear camoflage, hide behind trees, make bird calls?
I find myself occasionally interested in birdwatcher culture, which strikes me (based on my limited reading/exposure) as hyper-competitive. It’s as if it’s more about “having” the birds than actually seeing the birds, if that makes sense. But perhaps an actual birder will come along and set me straight.