In the past two posts, I got awfully excited about new ways to make digital photos look old. Then I found this reference to downloading and assembing free, artist-designed pinhole cameras by Corbis, the stock photo company. Download the project, assemble it with film inside, and off you go! Great for photography classes who want to do mostly digital work but perhaps delve into the origins of photography.

Image: http://www.corbis.readymech.com/en

From Yesterday, I wrote about the online photo generator that makes your digital photos look worn and grainy.

Here’s a parallel idea from Daria of the Glittergoods blog: hold your digital camera up to the viewfinder of an old reflex camera and take a photo. As Daria says:

people use digital cameras to snap shots through the viewfinders of old-school twin lens reflex cameras & end up with these amazing, dusty, black-framed, square-format results.

You’ll get interesting effects, especially around the edges, which tend to give black rounded edges. She points to the Through the Viewfinder (TtV) group on Flickr for more examples.

TtV is a public Flickr group, so you can take this technique for a spin and add your photos to the over 21,000 out there. Here are the rules for participating in that group:

Fakes, montage, or anything that is not true TtV is not allowed.

Tag your pictures with TtV, through the viewfinder, and the camera used (Duaflex, Starflex, whatever).

A limit of two shots posted to the group pool per day.

Color and contrast manipulation is allowed. In fact, Photoshop Actions such as Urban Acid work quite well!)

The bottom camera or viewing camera must be in one piece as its original intention, a camera.

Photos taken using disassembled cameras and homemade lenses are not allowed. They are not considered true TtV. A separate and extremely cool group, sPiNoFF!, was created for this type of experimentation.

Pictures found to be in more than eight different groups will be deleted.

Time to go unpack Mom and Dad’s childhood cameras and see if they’d work with this technique.

Image: “Arlington Cemetery TtV,” posted by Cybertoad to Flickr and used here with a Creative Commons license

My students love playing around with the Effects options in MovieMaker that make their videos look positively, well, analog — full of scratches, and jumpy film and grainy black-and-white.

Today, I heard about a Web site, Wanokoto Labs, that will alter your photos so they were taken 100 years ago.  No need for Photoshop!  Upload your photo, and before you know it, you’ve gone Old School.  Oh, and one tip.  Instead of feeling your way through the Japanese language site, click on “English” in the top-right corner.

BEFORE: The fabulous restored medieval castle at Trakai, Lithuania, circa 2007

AFTER: Cue the music — we’re going “Back in Time”!

Think of the fun kids would have creating Wild West posters featuring themselves as outlaws (good for descriptive writing practice) or creating settings for historical fiction.  Yee-haw!

Thanks Jess at All About Orange for blogging about this tool to and to this Flickr set for examples using people, not architecture.