Ok - so I love to experiment as you’ve probably guessed by now… I’d been wanting to try something that I saw done by a talented photographer on Etsy. She takes photos with her digital camera, shot through an old camera - the kind you can’t get film for any more. When I saw what she’d done, I was really excited about it because I had purchased several years before an old Argus Argoflex Seventy-five at an estate sale in NJ.

I thought it was such a cool old camera - it even came with a leather case. But, I was sad that I couldn’t get any film for it. Needless to say, I was excited to try shooting through it with my digital camera. So, when a few weeks ago, my mother in law brought me some dried thistle (I think that’s what it is) that she found in a field behind our house, I was really excited to try. It’s a bit tricky. The first shot was just for fun to see what would happen.

The black edges and black dust-looking things are from the old camera. This is the kind of camera where the viewfinder is about 2 inches wide and you look through it from the top… so, tricky, as I said, to get the shot. In order to even get one decent chance at a shot, I had to tape a piece of heavy art paper in a tube shape around my camera’s gobo and place the tube over the entire flip-up opening to the Argus viewfinder. This was to keep the glare off. The glass of the Argus’s viewfinder is convex, so glare is a real problem. Also, it was necessary to use the manual focus because auto-focus would get confused.
After experimenting a bit outside, I decided that the background (my backyard) is far too busy for what I was wanting to do, so I thought I’d try indoors. Wow! It worked better than I thought. I didn’t use a flash, and the lighting was terrible, but somehow I was still able to get a couple of decent photos. It’s too bad I cut off the top of the better one - I guess I need to get a second tripod. One tripod for the Argus and one for the digital. It has to be positioned just right to get the whole viewfinder (that rounded rectangle), plus I was having some camera-shake issues.

My photos don’t hold a candle to the photographer who inspired the idea, but they turned out ok, and really, it was just good fun! I love how it instantly gives that vintage look, and I didn’t have to apply any Photoshop filters, textures, or color effects.. these are untouched aside from cropping out all the extra black and changing the size for the web.

Creativity Question: Have you experimented with anything interesting lately - I mean, creatively?
Me? Within the last year: Wire sculpture, encaustic (since it’s new to me), camera through camera, and shadow puppets.