Sunday, August 15, 2010

Through the Viewfinder...or not

My newest obsession in the category of alternative photography techniques is TTV, or through the view(finder).  To some purists, this can only be described as a photograph taken through the viewfinder of another camera, usually a vintage camera, resulting in a dusty, vignetted, dreamy image.  I, however, happened upon a group on flickr, (http://www.flickr.com/groups/ttvdust/) made up of photographers who strive to produce ttv screens which can be applied to images in photoshop to achieve this look.  I decided to try both. Here are the results...


 The above image is my very first attempt.  There is a fantastic hedgerow in bloom in a nearby park that I thought would make a great subject.  I decided to use as my vintage camera a twin lens reflex Ricoh Super 44, and I took along my Canon Sure Shot digital camera to take the picture.  The Ricoh has a very nice,four-walled pop up around the view, which helped to block a lot of glare.
Long story short, this is not how I prefer to shoot.  The Ricoh is considerably heavy, which made me feel bogged down with equipment.  The other drawback would be the visible rings on the resulting image, which are more evident after the fact, as opposed to when you look through the view with your eye.  

This image is a fake.  I used a screen from the helpful folks at the above-mentioned flickr site to construct this one.  I have to admit, once I got the hang of this in my antiquated photoshop version 7.0, I found the process to be quite fun.  However, I miss the depth that you can achieve by actually taking a photograph through the viewfinder.  
So, I decided to build a black umbrella around the view of another vintage camera, a TLR Kodak Duaflex, and try again.


So this is how I've been doing things lately.  I think the view on this camera is a little too fuzzy for my taste, so I'm on the lookout for an alternative.  Until then, I'm happy playing around with this process.  Below are a few pictures of the black umbrella and the vintage Kodak, which simply slides into it.

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