My new TTV toy

Last week I acted on a tip that a local consignment store going out of business had some old cameras.

There was in fact a Polaroid model 150 roll film camera there. Unlike the other Polaroids I have, you can't get film for these older models anymore, but it was very clean and only $20 so I got it for a shelf piece.

Next to the 150 was a little Kodak Brownie camera for $15. Not in pristine condition by any means, but unlike the Brownie I've had for a while this one had a clear viewfinder with no lines.

That means TTV time baby!

That's "thought the viewfinder" for the uninitiated, wherein you use a modern digital camera to shoot through the waist level finder of a Brownie or some other such camera.

I know what you're thinking. It's sort of silly using the dirty viewfinder of a 50-year-old camera that wasn't even a good camera to start with in order to get low-fi pictures out of a $7,000 digital SLR set up.

If this boggles your mind, just think of the Brownie as a cheap but cumbersome filter that produces vintage looking pictures. It's sort of like the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone, but unlike the iPhone, I have all the motion-stopping shutter speeds and low light performance of that state of the art Canon Mark IV taking the pictures.

I took a little walk around downtown Gastonia the next day to play around with it. After adjusting to the reversed image in the viewfinder it was fun to use. I got these pictures a and a few odd looks from people on the street.