As many of you know, I’m constantly educating myself on my craft and I love to explore new ideas and techniques for shooting. If you’ve been following me here for a while you probably remember my love for old film cameras and that I’ve slowly been acquiring a collection of them. So I recently have been learning about a trending form of photography called “Through The Viewfinder” Photography (or TTV). Basically what you do is take an old camera, preferably a duaflex (or twins lens) camera and you take a picture of the image you see on the ground glass in the top of the camera. This creates a natural, in-camera grunge/vintage effect that’s really cool!

A couple things to note with “through the viewfinder” photography. You can sometimes have issues with glare on the ground glass of the film camera. So you may need to construct some kind of shield. I rolled up a piece of card stock and taped it together and shot my camera through that. It worked pretty good. I’ve seen a lot of people using cardboard and black tape to further cutback on glare, and I think that’s probably a really great idea. Also it can be really tricky to get your focus right. Make sure you focus the image on the ground glass camera first and then focus your digital camera on the image on the glass (not the glass itself – auto focus has a tendency to do that). And you’ll need to be really steady to keep everything in focus. Creating a rig to hold both the Twin Lens Camera and your digital camera can be really helpful too.

The images below are my first attempt at this new and fun shooting technique. For these “through the viewfinder” images I used my CircoFlex Twin Lens camera and my digital 5D Mark III with a 100 mm Macro lens. These pictures are all pretty much straight out of camera. No retouching. All I did was resize for web and add my logo. I had so much fun with this that I’m currently looking for a couple more old cameras that I can test this out on more. I’m curious to hear what you think though. I’d love to have you share your thoughts below!