Through the Viewfinder Tuesday!

Windmill-TTV, originally uploaded by William 74.

Through the Viewfinder photography is a relatively newish technique to make nice, shiny digital photographs look like they were shot on film about fifty or more years ago, with a cheap camera, and then stored in a shoebox in a slightly damp basement. It's simple but really hard to do at the same time.

Basically, what you do is take an old twin lens reflex camera, preferably a cheap plastic one like an Anscoflex or a Spartus, one with a lot of dust and crap on the reflecting mirror, and take a picture through the glass viewing window on the top of the camera. You need to build a box to block out extra light, and it's not unusual to get only the image you're looking at, or the dust, to be in focus, and I've discovered that composition can be tricky.

But the results are delightfully analogue, and somewhat timeless. This shot of the windmill in Batavia was taken this past spring, but looks like it could've been taken any time since the war.