Making the New, Old again

Recently I was working with a photographer to create a look from a “Toy Camera”. You know, the Diana’s and the Holga’s. Whats odd to me, almost funny in fact, is the act of taking an image with a five or six thousand dollar camera system and making the image look like it came from a camera system retailing for less than $50. Surprisingly its not a system thats actually dead despite the progression of the digital world. Holga recently released a 135mm version.

Despite the fact that the cameras were never designed to have vignetted edges and fuzzy images, that is exactly what they have become so favored for. Not to mention the happy accidents that couldnt possibly be predicted, such as double exposures or ghosting light leaks.

High Technology?

This presents the challenge of not only how to repeat something but also how to control it. Thats where the digital format rocks. We have such minute control over alost every aspect of the image it often leads us to spend far longer at the computer and come up with far more iterations of the same image.

But once we decide the look or style we can easily repeat it and perhaps tweak it, so you can have a series of images that look like they were the result of happy accidents but not too dissimilar from each other.

Using Photoshop actions, smart objects and Lightrooms ACR controls the process is surprisingly simple. The decision making and knowing when to stop, on the other hand, is not so obvious.