My partner Davin Trail-Risk and I have talked on and off about getting a cheapy thermal printer so we can print some of our own photos to use in our collage work. A thermal printer uses the same technology as a receipt, so while the prints are wonderfully low-res and very affordable, they fade in time.

For some reason, we talked about it but didn’t do it. But then Davin received a postcard in the mail from another artist, Wade Johnston that had a thermal printed photograph stuck on the back, and my interest was piqued. I’ve been missing photography. With my chronic illness being very debilitating right now, I’m further away than ever from my old life as a photographer. I often shot with a lot of low-fi and toy cameras, so I’m surprised it took me this long to jump on the thermal printer craze. While I can see the many uses for a Bluetooth printer, what I really want is a camera so that I can take photos and print them instantly as I would with a Polaroid. This type of photography is very accessible to me now, but I haven’t shot Polaroid in a long while because the price per print is much too high. Counting the cost of every photo I make takes the joy out of it.

Suddenly, thermal printing and kid’s thermal printing cameras has become my new hyper-fixation and I’ve been going deep down the rabbit hole researching the various models and paper sizes.

All of this has brought me back to the very early 2000s and the first generation of a little, kid’s digital camera I had called the Pocket DV. While thermal printing cameras are b&w and not colour, there’s a similar vibe, obviously because of the poor image quality and the way they capture light, but also, perhaps, because they were both originally intended and designed as kid’s toys. I’ve included some photos that I took with the Pocket DV back in the day. The Pocket DV was an absolute piece of garbage and the photos were tiny, but in playing around, I found I was able to capture everyday scenes in a way that made them more interesting. The camera was intended for shooting video, and I did that too. The videos were great, but I’d have to go digging on old hard drives to find them.

To begin, I bought the cheapest kid’s thermal printing camera I could find. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m very much looking forward to experimenting with it and finding out what it can do.

You can see more Pocket DV photos in the archives of my old Photoblog from 20 years ago. makinghappy.com/archive…