Long before mirrorless cameras learned to shoot in total silence, film stills photographers had a problem: their gear was loud. That signature ka-chunk of an SLR shutter might be music to a photographer’s ears, but on a live film set, it’s the kind of noise that can ruin a take. The solution? A giant, cumbersome contraption known as a sound blimp.
Film stills photographer Parisa Taghizadeh — Tag to those who know her — recently brought her old blimp system along to the podcast Out of Frame, which spotlights the people who make up film crews. The device she held up looks less like camera kit and more like something an astronaut might pack: an enormous, padded casing designed to swallow a DSLR whole and muffle its mechanical clatter.
How it worked
The concept is refreshingly analog. You place the camera inside the housing, seal it up, and plug it in. The connection gives the operator two external controls:
- One button to focus
- One button to release the shutter
With the camera entombed in soundproofing, the shutter noise that would otherwise cut through a quiet scene is reduced to a whisper. Tag says she started using her blimp on the TV series Top of the Lake, precisely so the shutter wouldn’t interrupt production during rolling takes.
Her verdict on the hardware? “Cumbersome” and “heavy.” But she admits there was an upside — hauling around such a massive camera made her feel important.
Why it’s suddenly relevant again
Sound blimps have been quietly disappearing from sets. As Tag puts it, “It’s something we no longer use.” Modern mirrorless cameras shoot completely silently thanks to their electronic shutters, making the whole soundproofing exercise unnecessary for stills work.
Yet the humble blimp is having a moment. Director Christopher Nolan recently got people talking about blimp systems after using one to tame the notoriously loud IMAX cameras he shot The Odyssey on. The blimp makes an already gigantic 70mm camera even bigger — so enormous, in fact, that actors Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal reportedly needed a mirror system just to see each other around the beast during filming.
It’s a neat reminder that the problem of a noisy camera isn’t new, and neither is the brute-force fix. Where Nolan’s crew wraps a cinema camera in a blimp the size of a small appliance, stills photographers were quietly doing the same thing to their SLRs years earlier.
The wider takeaway is a small technological victory hiding in plain sight. The electronic shutter — a feature most of us now take for granted — didn’t just make cameras faster and quieter. It made an entire category of specialist, back-breaking gear obsolete. Tag’s blimp is now a museum piece, a physical monument to a problem that engineers eventually solved with software and silence.
