Blog

For several years now, I have been encountering photographs, obviously new in origin, made to look like old, beat up polaroid-type pictures.  I have been wondering - how have folks been generating these?  Has a huge cache of old cameras and film been unleashed?  Do folks know how to really "fake" dirt and weird colors in photo-editing software?  What?

As it turns out, it's a little bit of both.  No, it is not true that old cameras AND film are being used, but old cameras are being used in a new way.  It's called "TTV" photography, or "through the viewfinder".  Old Kodak Duaflex cameras are being set up to "view" a scene, and the actual picture is taken with a digital camera.  Through the Duaflex's viewfinder. By sheer luck we happen to have one of these old Duaflex's in the house.  So I set about trying the technique out.

It was a bit tricky to get the digital camera to focus on the image instead of the viewfinder itself, and the viewfinder had to have something around it like a box to block the glare off the viewfinder, but once it was set up, I got a picture like this:

Don't you love all the grunge?  The black rim you see is the rim of the viewfinder itself - I cropped the image to include it to add to the dreamy feel.

But the colors are still true - how to get a truly authentic looking "vintage" photo?  Again, in the old days, some cool color effects were achieved in photography when chemicals for one type of film were used to process a different film.  They referred to this as "cross-processing".  And lo-and-behold, a thoughtful Italian photographer has published a tutorial on the web for users of the GIMP photoediting software (of which I am one) on how to mock up cross-processing for digital images.

So here's my new "vintage" photograph:

The mind races - what fun is this going to be?!!!  I can't wait to work some magic on photos from France and Italy.  And then working prints of them into encaustic pieces.