Photo Mode - Red Dead Redemption 2 - Nikolay Maslov || blog

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is a game where you can roam around a fictionalized 1899 US robbing banks and trains, fighting off rival gangs, eluding Pinkerton detectives (they’re still around btw), fishing, hunting, and even run into some UFOs. There’s a lot written about the game, including its status as a major artwork of its/our era, its historicity, and the broader labor practices that went into getting the game made.

This is not a post about any of those things. This is about the cameras available in the game and the photos that players have taken with it. It’s the first of a series of a series I’m tagging Photo Mode to collect some uses of in-game photo mechanics.

Arthur holding the game’s camera. No doubt a Kodak-inspired box camera.

The game is over a half-decade old at this point, but there still seems to be some life to the RDR2 photo community. There’s also a robust digital archive of the practice and photo works. There’s a subreddit, a 110k+ member Facebook group, a number of dedicated Instagram accounts, how-to guides, and a long trail of YouTube videos.

There was an apparent peak of players diving deep into RDR2’s photo mode during the height of the pandemic lockdown, but some of the community is still active. Speaking of the pandemic, in June of 2020 Rockstar release The Naturalist Update for Red Dead Online (the multiplayer version of the game). One of the items included in that update was the “advanced camera” which could be purchased for $540 of in-game currency. (Which adjusted for inflation could place the camera’s value at anywhere between $16,000 to $25,000, depending on what calculator you use. That’s an expensive camera, even by today’s standards of expensive cameras.)

Red Dead 2’s advanced camera

In-game catalog description for the advanced camera

The advanced camera is described as follows in the game:

This is the lightest, most maneuverable hand camera on offer. It is simple enough that a child or adult with imbecilic tendencies can use it. Indeed, we receive thousands of queries from customers too afraid to undertake the photographic arts. It is quite an easy process manipulating the camera, taking a picture, and developing the film with chimeric inducing chemicals in a pitch-black confined space. With this camera, you may move freely while looking through the lens, apply ten different film treatments and take self-portraits.

While the default camera looks to be based on the Kodak Camera of the late 1880s (it might be the Brownie, though it wasn’t released until 1900), the advanced camera could be based on any number of compact cameras from the era. An interesting sidebar is that the in-game characters would have been shooting both on film (roll film to be specific, as the 35mm format in photography didn’t really become widespread until a few decades into 20th century) and on glass plates.