- Rolands Atvars -

I was on my holiday in Latvia (funny, because I’m originally from Latvia) where I found my old Zenit C camera. It’s an old USSR 35mm film camera, that doesn’t work (well doesn’t work for me, although I was never impressed of Zenit’s camera quality). Since I’m not the type of person who likes to throw things out (even if they don’t work), TTV was the way to go.

First of all – what TTV is. It’s when you shoot photos from another cameras viewfinder. Usually medium format cameras are used, because of they relatively huge viewfinders. What this gives is a picture with lots of bugs (like dust and and other bits and pieces) that are used as effects. Also light will shine differently and you can do weird stuff with focusing.

Now I don’t have a medium format camera (…yet…) but I sure have an old 35mm SLR camera…that has a viewfinder…and that doesn’t work…and I also have an iPhone that can be used as camera, because it’s small enough for the 35mm cameras viewfinder. What an awesome combo don’t you think? So this is the setup I used for my TTV photography. And it was pretty good I must say. Didn’t expect to much, because iPhone (iPhone4) is still a mobile phone and the viewfinder for Zenit C is pretty small (especially if compared to medium format cameras viewfinder). Good thing was that Zenit C had a pretty dirty viewfinder which did make some cool effects. Also iOS 4.1 awesome HDR feature was very helpful, because that did fix the overexposed middle of the pictures I took.

Problems

The biggest problem is that the viewfinder is way too small so only the middle of picture will have the actual image – rest will be a dark frame. You could use zoom to get around it, but since iPhone4 doesn’t have an optical zoom (only digital) then I didn’t do that – I just cropped the pictures afterwards (digital zoom would give the same thing, but doing it manually at the end seems better to me).

Second problem is that middle of the picture was overly exposed. Sometimes that gave some cool effects, but most of the times that was way too annoying. iOS 4.1 HDR feature fixed that for me, but if you have a different camera, then some sort of HDR feature would be nice – or you might use a better cameras viewfinder (can’t tell you that that would be better but I would think so).

Third problem – you have less light coming in so you have to use slower exposure times or bigger ISO’s (well I didn’t have to choose, because iPhone made assumptions for me) – that means bigger noise in the picture. Plus I had a pretty grain’i viewfinder in Zenit C. All those things made pictures “dirty”. You might use it as effect.

Last problem is focusing. Since you are basically using two cameras you have to places to choose focus. On for the viewfinder camera and one for the camera you are actually taking pictures with. It’s all relatively good when you focus to infinity, but it’s not so good when you try to focus to something closer to you. Especially if your ‘image taking’ camera doesn’t have manual focus. Most of the time when I tried to take pictures of objects that are closer to me, iPhone tried to focus on actual mirror in the Zenit C camera. Luckily with a bit of time and luck I managed to focus on the correct thing (most of the times). Touch to focus helped me – I assume that that would be harder for complete auto focus camera and more flexible for manual focus camera.

Post Processing

Since I took pictures with iPhone it made sense to me to post process them on iPhone as well. I cropped them in ‘PS Express’ app and added some random effects in ‘Best Camera’ app. The only effects that looked good where some lomographic style effects, like overly contrasted pictures or black and white pictures with extra contrast. You might think of something else.

Results

Well the results aren’t very awesome. I got about 2 mega pixel photos after all the cropping. Quality was very poor – but again – some might say that that’s an effect. I’m not too impressed of the results, but I think some of the pictures are pretty interesting and it was sure fun to take them. I would say – go for TTV if you have a random 35mm SLR (or better – medium format camera) with working viewfinder and another camera to actually take pictures with. You can’t really loose.

All the pictures I made using TTV technique can be seen on my TTV flickr set.