Why Did Colin Creevey's Muggle Camera Work at Hogwarts?

Question

Hermione says in Goblet of Fire:

‘All those substitutes for magic Muggles use – electricity, and computers and radar, and all those things – they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there’s too much magic in the air.'

_{Goblet of Fire - pages 475-476 - Bloomsbury - chapter 28, The Madness of Mr Crouch}

and in Chamber of Secrets Colin Creevey says this:

‘[A]nd a boy in my dormitory said if I develop the film in the right potion, the pictures’ll move.’ Colin drew a great shuddering breath of excitement and said, ‘It’s brilliant here, isn’t it?'

_{Chamber of Secrets - page 75 - Bloomsbury - chapter 6, Gilderoy Lockhart}

How is it that Colin Creevey's Muggle camera works properly at Hogwarts and on the Hogwarts grounds? Further, how is it that a magical potion could create moving pictures from Muggle film, which only takes one-framed (for lack of a better description) shots at a time?

I'm assuming Colin's camera is not digital, as this is 1991 (first expensive DSLRs appeared in 1991), plus Colin, obviously, references film.

Answer 1

The Harry Potter wikia has an answer (it "runs off of the magical atmosphere"), but the reference is the entire second book.

Other than that, I think @Zoe is correct - all the examples given in Goblet of Fire require electricity, while old-fashioned cameras didn't use it for anything other than the flash. Nothing more than a spark is needed for the film and a flash for the bulb, so even if it goes haywire there's not much that can go wrong.

As for how they can move - he didn't say what they'd be doing when they moved. I think, although I'm not certain, that it was covered somewhere else on another HP question - wizarding photographs are developed in a special potion that makes them come to life, and Colin could have been referencing that. So they wouldn't necessarily be doing the exact same thing they were doing when the picture was taken, unless that was part of the magic (perhaps based on the caster's memory?).

Answer 2

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets the camera was supposedly designed to use ambient magical energy in the air to function at Hogwarts.

• Looking up the actual physical device, the Argus C3 is a completely mechanical camera and did not need or use any electricity at all, so it should not have been affected by any magical dysfunction caused by Hogwarts.

Argus C3

The Argus C3 was constructed primarily of Bakelite plastic and metal castings. The design featured an unusual but simple diaphragm shutter built into the camera body, so the camera could make use of interchangeable lenses without the need for a complex focal plane shutter. The rangefinder was separate from the viewfinder and was coupled to the lens through a series of gears located on the outside of the camera body. The profusion of knobs, gears, buttons, levers, and dials on the camera lent it a "scientific" look that was found in customer surveys to be one of the things buyers most liked about the camera. The C3 was principally designed by Dr. Gustave Fassin.

Magical cameras in the Wizarding world use a special film and potion to create the movable images seen in much of the magical photography used.

These fascinating characteristics of wizard photographs are made possible not by some wholly magical procedure, but by a mixture of Muggle technology and wizarding magic. The photographic lens captures the image in a camera using film – all Muggle inventions – then these films are developed using a special magical potion that imbues the photographs with the movement and “life” that Muggle stills could never achieve. > J.K. Rowling Official Website. “Why did Colin Creevey’s camera work etc?” F.A.Q. 2006. J.K. Rowling Official Website. 18 July 2007.

Answer 3

JKR addressed that in FAQs on her site.

Why did Colin Creevey's camera work etc?

Wizards do not need electricity to make these things work; they function by magic, but in the case of such objects the wizards liked the Muggle invention enough to appropriate the idea without adding cumbersome plugs/batteries.

... I have an old notebook in which it says dev sol (potion) magic [indecipherable word] photos move. Adept as I am at interpreting my old scribbles, I can tell you that the original idea was that wizards would use a magical developing potion to make their photographs move.

SO... as Colin's batteries can't work in Hogwarts, clearly his camera is running off the magical atmosphere and he is then developing his photographs in the magical potion that causes the figures therein to move. All of which goes to show that Colin has a lot more initiative than I ever realised.

Answer 4

Aside from the other answers that describe how a mechanical camera doesn't conflict with the statements around messing with electrical equipment, here's a possible theory on how the motion is captured:

The camera could be constructed, either mechanically or with magical assistance, to take 2 or more pictures over a series of time. The time could be on the order of seconds but enough to capture a range of motion. The magically assisted film development phase would then interpolate the differences between frames to create the appearance of seamless motion. It's pretty much the same concept as motion film, only the projector in this case is a magically enhanced two dimensional screen.