PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNEY.com

Cameras are modern and more sophisticated. Lenses are sharper. Digital darkrooms are vastly more powerful. So let’s consider why do so many photographers try so hard to make their new digital technology look like good ‘ole film?

Some folks get amazingly creative, using rubber bands and presumably anything else they can find to make Holga cameras… digital.

Holgas, if you don’t know, are the polar opposite of digital. Making a Holga digital is a little bit like computerizing a set of Lincoln Logs - impressive, but kinda weird.

Holgas are old toy cameras made out of plastic. They produce beautifully distorted images with a lot of light leak that a lot of fine art photographers love. It’s said that no two Holga cameras are exactly alike in terms of the image distortion.

And so now… you too can strap a Holga lens to that nice Canon EOS 5D and go wild. That is until, as this article explained, you have to remove the lens. At that point the poor Holga lens kinda breaks. Well, not kinda - it breaks.

And then we have the software. Endless supplies of presets and plugins for Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, whatever. You can turn black and white images into color. Color into black and white. Increase the grain as if you shot at 1000 ISO (and I might point out here that ISO is a completely artificial construct in the digital world - not at all as it was with film… but that’s another topic).

I’ve seen presets for Lightroom that help achieve the look of early 1970s color film. And if you don’t like that, try Sepia.

The popular photo-sharing web site, Flickr, even has a group dedicated to the idea making all our new stuff look old. It’s called “My Digital Photo Looks Like Film.” I looked hard but could find one called “My Film Looks Like Digital.” Hmmm.

It’s funny to me that ever since the line between the film age and the digital age became clear - some people have been trying to blur it back again. Come to think of it, I wonder what tool they use for that? Smudge? Clone? Layers?

Well, that’s it for now. I’m outta time. Gotta go clean the image sensor on my Pentax K1000.

Popularity: 6% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed!