Giant Camera: This is no hoax—it's real. The Dreaming Camera Café is a coffee shop built by two retired South Korean Army Aviation pilots next to the bungalow where they live with their daughter in the YangPyung countryside east of Seoul.
The photographic theme is continued inside, where the telephone is also modeled on a red Rolleiflex and the toilet paper dispensers look like film cannisters!
Part café, part photographica museum
We like, we like. Here's the Café's Facebook page.
It's supposedly a big tourist attraction and popular with the locals. Anybody been there?
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Giant Photograph: On a much more somber note, this art installation in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan is part of an effort called #NotABugSplat. The area has been heavily bombed by U.S. predator drones, where activists claim that 380 drone strikes have killed 3,500 adults and more than 200 children. A "bug splat" is allegedly military slang for a drone casualty, derived from the fact that people look like insects to drone cameras.
Giant photograph seen from the ground
The girl pictured is not identified, but according to the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), one of the organizations that helped create the giant poster, the child lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack.
The purpose of the giant photograph is to give a face to possible victims, from the air. More here.
Mike
(Thanks to Andrew and Stan B.)
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Featured Comments from:
Mandeno Moments: "The Dreaming Camera Café is what every wife fears when her husband develops GAS. :-) "
More on big cameras (that actually take pictures): http://www.ianruhter.com/#s=8&mi=1&pt=0&pi=15&p=-1&a=0&at=0. The pictures are interesting and the videos show some of the process and the camera too.
Posted by: Karel Kravik | Thursday, 10 April 2014 at 03:58 PM
There was an old photographer who lived in a camera.....
Posted by: Richard Newman | Thursday, 10 April 2014 at 04:49 PM
Giants of photography?
Posted by: Herman Krieger | Thursday, 10 April 2014 at 05:22 PM
I'll bet the cafe serves their coffee in those lens mugs.
I'll have a soy, double shot no foam Summilux please.
Posted by: Rob Atkins | Thursday, 10 April 2014 at 08:11 PM
Check out this more practical giant camera for sale via Luminous Landscape.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=88835.0
Posted by: Jeremy | Thursday, 10 April 2014 at 11:07 PM
A friend and I have long discussed use of a 20m container as a pinhole camera. This looks bigger.
Any idea of the lens specs ;-)?
Posted by: Nigel Robinson | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 01:33 AM
"US predator drones... 380 drone strikes have killed 3,500 adults and more than 200 children"
All while the good folks of the USA are having their civil liberties stripped in the name of protection from terrorism. Under the watch of a president awarded the Nobel Peace prize.
Please tell me this is just a bad dream.
Posted by: Bill Kearney | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 01:57 AM
the dreaming cafe may be "real," but does it take pictures? how many megapixels do you get with really, really large format?
Posted by: scott | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 02:44 AM
I sincerely hope that the curtains for the cafe close like an aperture.
Posted by: Adam Lanigan | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 04:25 AM
Another place to eat while surrounded by old cameras is the cafe at Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight in England.
The museum there was the home of the photographer Juliet Margaret Cameron. There are both permanent exhibitions and temporary ones. I visit there every time I go to the Isle of Wight.
Posted by: Roger Bradbury | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 05:17 AM
For a moment I thought that the Koreans had erected a memorial to Vivian Maier.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 10:08 AM
Although the NotABugSplat post did not generate comments, don't think it was a post that was passed over as unimportant. It matters, but it also speaks for itself.
Posted by: David Miller | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 01:49 PM
Bill- I'm certainly not without sin on this, but as long as people prefer to address novelties rather than the very things that most deeply affect their own lives (as well as those of others), we will continue to live a reality very much like one very long and very bad dream...
Posted by: Stan B. | Friday, 11 April 2014 at 10:44 PM