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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 8:11 pm and is filed under artsy, babble, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.