Seville- Oranges, Horses & Stripes Oh My

I'm heading back to Spain and Portugal at the end of September and looking forward to taking a lot more photos.  Until then, I'm still enjoying working through the loads of photos I took on my trip last month.


Happy Friday and have a great weekend!
Andrea

Oranges- Seville, Spain

Horse & Carriages- Seville, Spain

Dance Dresses- Seville Spain

Seville, Spain

Seville, Spain

Hubdude in Tapas Bar- Seville, Spain

West Coast Crush II

Still in Portland and still loving it.  Today I made it to the Chinese Garden and Washington Park, though did not go into the Japanese garden there because it was so close to closing.  It's really cold here right now- I think it was in the 20's today.  I wasn't expecting the weather to be this cold here so I neglected to bring enough cold weather gear. 

Nonetheless, I did brave the Chinese Garden but it was so cold that a lot of the plants were wrapped in plastic which was a little disappointing.  There were a few persimmons left (frozen solid like ice cubes!) and a handful of frozen flowers.  Thanksgiving is my last day here and we're going to see the gorge since I don't care about holidays.  Hopefully it will be a little warmer... 

Some photos from the garden...

West Coast Crush

I'm visiting Portland this week on an exploratory trip.  I was here as a youngster with my family on the road trips we made annually from San Francisco but I don't really remember Portland, I only remember the coast.

Maybe you already know but Portland is an amazing moss covered, brilliant green, bike friendly city.  A place I could easily live.  It's been a little chilly, putting a slight damper on my plans to visit all the different gardens, but perusing bookstores, drinking coffee and wandering the old neighborhoods is a perfect alternative.  It's cold today so what better day to go to the coast and walk on the beach?

 

TtV Favorites

As I've mentioned before, I'm newly enamored with TtV photography.  These are a few of my favorites from around the web.  Sit back, relax and enjoy the Friday view.

Gothicrow

Kat

Crowolf

Urbanwoodchuck

Elgarboart

Luckycandace

Beautifuldarklight

The TtV Contraption and Results

There's a certain photographic look I've been trying to achieve without total success until now.  I like my Holga for its quirky vintage-look photos.  I LOVE my Polaroid cameras and especially love the new films by the Impossible Project, but both the old (eBay) and new films are not priced in a way that encourages experimentation and I have yet to get the look I've been trying for.

I recently discovered TtV photography and I was really blown away by the images I found from other people using this method.  The photos have great vintage framing and the look is not as crisp and flat as a lot of digital photos.  I immediately and without pause set about trying to figure out how people were creating these beautiful images and how I could make my own.

TtV stands for 'Through the Viewfinder' which means that you take a picture with one camera (a digital camera) focused through the viewfinder of a second camera.  The second camera is an old twin-lens reflex camera of some kind.  The twin-lens reflex cameras were designed to be shot from waist height, so the viewfinder is on top of the camera and you look down on it as you're focusing.  In the case of TtV, you point the lens of your digital camera down and focus on the viewfinder of the TLR camera.

After doing some research on the best old TLRs to use, I found an old Kodak Duaflex camera on eBay.  It arrived a few days ago and I tore it apart, cleaned up the lenses and mirror and put it all back together again.  Some people prefer the look that dust particles give their photos and I must say I like them too, so I probably won't clean the lenses on the next TLR that I get (Ensign Ful-Vue just as soon as I find the right one).

Then I researched the 'contraption' part of the set up.  Basically, the contraption is needed (although there are differing opinions on this...) to block light, glare and prevent weird reflections between the two cameras.  I found a really great website with some helpful DIY instructions on building a contraption here. Apparently some people do use the TtV method without a contraption or use their hands or something else to try to block the light, but I decided to go with the contraption because my favorite photos all seemed to come from people that were using a contraption setup.

Here is my contraption.  The TLR  is on the bottom and the digital camera on top is point down to the viewfinder on the top of the bottom camera.  The top camera is on a super macro setting.

I built my contraption and found that immediately I started getting some of the effects that I've been looking for!  I'm really happy with this setup and imagine I'll be quite distracted from all other projects for a while as I work on teasing out the full range of possibilities with this photographic method.

You can see that I have some work to do on figuring out how close I can get to my subjects, but overall I'm really happy with the technique.  It seems to take both big outdoor shots and up-close shots pretty well.