Photography

Norte Photoblocker keeps your face out of embarrassing club photos

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The Norte Photoblocker is a functional beer cooler surrounded by four sensors that can detect the flashes from cameras or cell phones and fire back its own flash to ruin an resulting photos
The Norte Photoblocker is a beer cooler that keeps your nightlife private by wrecking photos as they're taken
The Norte Photoblocker is a functional beer cooler surrounded by four sensors that can detect the flashes from cameras or cell phones and fire back its own flash to ruin an resulting photos

How many times have you been going about your usual business of cheating on your spouse, being an idiot around your boss, or drunkenly harassing fellow party-goers when some wildly irresponsible person tags you in a photo and posts it online? What's that? "Never," you say? Well congratulations on being an alright human being then. You can feel good about the fact that you don't need the Norte Photoblocker to ruin any potentially damaging photos of your night out as they're being taken.

It may sound like something dreamed up by a cheesy men's magazine as a joke, but apparently this is a real thing that actually exists. Ostensibly, the Norte Photoblocker is a functional beer cooler surrounded by four sensors that can detect the flashes from cameras or cell phones. If a flash goes off in the direction of the Photoblocker, it fires its own flash to flood the resulting photos with bright white and obscure anyone nearby. It's similar technology to the clutch bag from a couple years ago that was designed for celebrities hoping to strike back at the paparazzi, or the car accessory that obscures stop light cameras. In this case, a cautious individual would just need to set the Photoblocker near them while at a bar or club to ensure their nightlife stays private (at least until they decide to move somewhere else, where they'll have to repeatedly explain to everyone why they're carrying an electric blue wastebasket).

The Norte Photoblocker is a beer cooler that keeps your nightlife private by wrecking photos as they're taken

The Norte Photoblocker is the brainchild of South American beer brand Cerveza Norte and Brazil-based ad agency Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi. The agency has actually field-tested the device in a few bars in Argentina and found they work exactly as promised. "People took lots of photos that ended up being blurry beyond recognition and then uploaded them to social media anyway," says Maxi Itzkoff, executive creative director at Del Campo. All joking aside, the Norte Photoblocker could also appeal to the privacy-conscious club goer who doesn't lead a life of constant abandon and just wants a night out without worrying about an acquaintance posting photos online of their drunken fun. Del Campo however has decided to focus on the sleazier uses for the gadget in the accompanying ad campaign. Check out the none-too-subtle commercials below to see how the Norte Photoblocker can be used to save your job, your marriage, and your reputation.

Source: Fast Company

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7 comments
Kris Lee
Time to invest into those big aperture lenses so flash is not needed.
ukatama
Would this work on red light and speed cameras.
johnweythek
Thinking back to the movie Inside Man with clive owen or something like that and also playing with remotes and digital cameras... this should work. for some reason, though you can\'t see it, (most, never assume all) digital cameras pick up infra red signals without extra equipment. So the end of most remotes is an LED in the infra red range (ignoring all the different signals it puts out for different commands to a tv). Lining your liscence plate with bright IR LED\'s could potentially block traffic cameras and if caught with said device buy you an extended stay in the slammer. But the car has power running through it and led\'s require very little, less than the bulbs lighting up your plate. You could make many things camera proof with infra red signal but this won\'t have the same effect on old school film, though the chances are so slim nowadays anyone would be using some. If you\'re a smoker and have a camera and have never done so... look at the \"cherry\" with the camera screen or take a picture, it should be purple. That\'s more infra red energy (in this case from heat of the lit cigarette) being picked up by a camera.
Gregg Eshelman
Infrared LEDs around a license plate don\'t do squat VS laser speed guns or photo radar.
What does somewhat inhibit the detection range of the lasers is driving with your lights on bright in the daytime. So can mounting additional lights with infrared filters matching the bandwidths used by the laser speed guns, the closer to your license plates, the better. They aim at the plates due to the retro-reflective film which bounces light much of the light back along the same angle it came from.
William H Lanteigne
I still use \"Old School\" 35mm cameras. For clubbing pics I\'d use a f1.7 lens and ISO 1600 or 3200 film.
Ed
If your extracurricular activities can get you into this type of trouble, then perhaps you need to really reassess your life and the way you are living it.
Charles Barnard
Good thing available light capability is rapidly improving... Won't stop surveillance cameras either.
Ubiquitous surveillance means we have to decide which laws and customs are both important and enforceable...what people do "in private" goes far beyond their public selves.