This picture of King Kong was taken with my recently rediscovered Fisher Price Creative Effects toy camera. The Creative Effects camera is, depending on your point of view, a resounding success or a humiliating failure. It is rather large: 6 inches wide by 4 inches tall by 4 inches deep, give or take (I don't have it in front of me right now and, surprisingly, I can't find all that much information about it on the web. (not that I searched very hard)). It is made out of blue, black and pink plastic, takes 6 AA batteries and prints on thermal receipt paper loaded into a proprietary (and long since unavailable) cartridge. It has a switch for outdoors/indoors (this switch operates quite like the outdoor/indoor switch on Fisher Price's much fetishized toy video camera, the PXL2000, insomuch as when you switch it to 'outdoors' it simply puts a dark filter over the lens.), a switch for darkening or lightening the print (my few experiments lead me to believe that this switch is more or less useless), a knob for changing the template that the photograph gets printed on (fake money, TV, comic-esque frame (see Kong, above), etc. There is no option to print just the picture without any template so you are doomed to, at the very least, always have the little empty box at the bottom of your prints and waste approximately 20% of your paper. Nice!), a reprint button (cool feature, actually), the button you press to take the picture and, last and certainly least there is a little, erm, cavity into which you can (theoretically) stick a little doodad to give you even more templates (I've never seen one, or heard of one, or heard of anyone seeing or hearing of one. ever.). When you take a picture the camera beeps for as long as the 'shutter' stays open (the less the light the longer the beep) and then (this is my favorite part) the camera plays a DEAFENINGLY loud little electronic song two whole times plus the beginning of a third time (if you have ever heard this song you can sing it now. I promise. It is the most annoyingly catchy little number you can imagine and it really is LOUD. First couple of times you hear it it is cute but it very quickly becomes infuriating. So you sing along. And then you find yourself (ok, MYself) thinking "Why not play this song just once, or just twice, or just write a longer song, or just make a quiet clicking sound, or a little tape recording that says 'I am crunching the numbers necessary to print your picture, please hold on one moment'?" until the little song stops. And then it makes this goddawful whirring noise while it prints your little picture (the whirring noise is also loud (but not AS loud) and lasts a good minute or so.) Then you have your picture. Here are a just a few more pictures taken with the creative effects camera. This is another one of those "maybe I will keep updating this and maybe I won't" sort of things, so check back occasionally. Or not.