The Camera Bag: Timeless Capture Is a Camera Designed to Get Emotional About

The Timeless Capture Camera is an absurdist photographic device that promises nothing and delivers less. It is perfection itself.

Once upon a time, college students made news by eating goldfish or dancing naked on campus. Now, thanks to the Internet, they come up with zany ideas that can zip around the world faster than you can slip on a pratfall banana peel. Design student Brian Matanda understands this well and has made news by hoisting an idea up the proverbial flagpole and getting a kick out of watching folks salute it.

Matanda says that because digital SLR change so often, photographers don’t "feel the same way about our cameras and the images they produce."

Since Paul Simon sang about his love for his Nikon camera and Kodachrome film, the relationship between photographer and camera has, according to Matanda, been all downhill.

Asking himself this question he set about creating the ideal camera to love. He did it by taking away all the distractions of cameras.

Matanda’s concept Timeless camera takes pictures that cannot be loaded onto a PC or the web or even gotten out of the camera. In fact, you cannot even see them until you get close enough to the WiFi connected viewer. In other words, the Timeless Capture, won’t be thrown away because it keeps all your pictures inside it.

Matanda feels that users of this camera would develop an emotional connection with this camera because what you take with the Timeless stays in the Timeless.

"An object that would have incredible amounts of personal value embedded at the heart of its use thereby making it irreplaceable," he says.

Stripping away all the common features that keep us from cherishing our little digital buddies, stuff like reviewing images on a monitor (there is none), or editing, or deleting, and/or copying photos. The photographer will have no choice but to keep the Timeless if he or she ever wants to see their pictures again.

For Matanda, the Timeless will become a family heirloom, and what an heirloom it is. A timeless blend of sand blasted aluminum and laser cut, polished teak; it has two buttons on its top deck, an optical viewfinder and a lens. The separate viewer box has a 3.2-inch screen and an LED that indicates when images are transferred from the camera.

Like any good marriage, made of something old, something new and something, maybe blue, the Timeless is forever. Comprised of a cannibalized old 7-megapixel Vivitar digital camera loaded with a 4 GB WiFi-capable SD card, it has a chopped Samsung Galaxy Spica GT-i5700 at the heart of its viewer.

"The inspiration behind the functionality was to create an object that could not be disposed of," the 24-year-old said. “The aim is to have the images exclusively between these two devices in the hope that this would 'make' the user appreciate the value of the product more as they build up over time."

Happily, Matanda has no plans to manufacture the Timeless Capture. I suppose because that would almost be like sharing it with others, and in this case, not sharing is caring.

However, just thinking about the Timeless Capture camera, feelings, and emotions well up inside of me. Unfortunately, these are feelings I cannot speak about in a public forum.

See more in the video below.