This is our sharpest lens ever, the marketing bods tell us. The first phone camera to have 200 megapixels, the adverts scream. It seems nearly every advert, every influencer video is telling us that your peak photography moment requires the ultimate image quality and mind bending resolution.
Very little photography marketing these days tunes into the most important element, creativity. Why is that? Because you can be creative with cheap, old and used camera gear as much, if not more than with the latest megapixel busting dream machine.
The simple fact is chasing perfection can stifle our creativity. We can concentrate far too much on the many technical elements of our cameras to the point of ignoring the creative. Today we are going to look at why low tech and older camera gear might just be the creative spark that you are looking for.
Old Lenses Give Beautiful Images
I have talked about this before, using vintage film lenses on your high tech digital camera. We are at a stage where the use of old lenses is no longer the friction point it used to be. There are a plethora of companies selling great quality adapters for pretty much every film lens mount that exists, to every digital camera. Most of these will not give you auto modes, but that’s part of the creative experience.
Beyond the adapters, modern cameras have so many tools that allow us to nail both focus and exposure with these old lenses. Focus peaking is an ideal tool for nailing sharpness, whilst histograms will enable us to get our exposure spot on.
The tactile feel and manual elements of using these old lenses is a real creative boost and the aesthetics of old glass can give us a beautiful, analogue look to our digital images. I was blown away with my recent flirtation with an old Minolta lens on my Sony a7Rv, the look it gave images was sublime.
Dreamy Images For Low Cost
One of the ironies, perhaps enigmas of modern digital photography is the recent rise of the “mist” filters. These filters add a subtle softness and haloing to our shots. The irony being that we spend not inconsiderable sums on ultra sharp lenses, only to need to spend more on filters to tone them down. There’s also the fact that these “pro mist” filters are not cheap – higher quality ones come in at several hundreds of dollars.
Now if, like me, you are from simpler times, you will know a trick or two that will give you the mist look for considerably less money. The first is the vaseline look, the second the black stocking look. Neither will be as technically good as a pro mist filter, but neither will cost significant sums of money either.
The vaseline look involves using a very cheap UV filter and smearing a thin coat of vaseline over it. Depending on how much you use, you can get a very dreamy look all the way down to a slight bloom, similar to mist filters. You can also get a similar look by spraying hair spray over the filter.
The other way is to cut an old pair of black nylon stockings to fit over a lens. Use an elastic band to hold the stocking in place and you will get an old, cinema style look to your images. By varying the denier you can alter the power of the effect.
Pinhole Photography
One of the easiest and cheapest ways to get into pinhole photography is by creating a simple pinhole lens. Now of course you can use any of your lenses for this technique, you are not sticking a pinhole in the actual optics but in a spare lens cap of the same filter diameter.
You need to be a little careful creating the pinhole but the results can be really interesting and push your creative boundaries. To create your pinhole, find the dead centre of the lens cap and drill a very small hole in it. Cover the hole with some black tape then use a needle to push through a clean smaller hole.
You are going to need some patience when shooting, long exposure and infinite depth of field, combined with an ethereal dreamy look are the order of the day. You will of course need a tripod or at least a steady position for the camera, but the end results are fun and creative. One side effect is that using a pinhole lens will really show up where you have sensor dust, you can take that as a good thing or a bad thing.
Danny De Vylder on Unsplash
Diffuser Box For Flash
If you shoot flash, you will know that the straight on output is harsh and unflattering. We can often bounce that flash off ceilings or walls. Whilst that will soften the overall look it can introduce unwanted, directional shadows. The solution, a diffuser box.
Some flash companies sell diffusers for their flashguns, but like all things photographic, they are not cheap. You can however make a simple one for a few dollars All you need is some white card, tape and tracing paper. I will not go into detail on how to make one – there are plenty of videos on YouTube, but in short you create four trapezoidal pieces of card, one end to fit the size of your flashgun’s head, the other tapering to a wide funnel. You tape those card pieces together and cover the larger end with the tracing paper. Done well it can be a very useful way of softening the output from your flash.
Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash
All of these hacks above are low cost and effective ways to get similar results to much more expensive options. All of them require input from you as a photographer. This means that you need to slow down and think about how you are using your low-fi camera kit. That in turn is a great boost to your photographic creativity. All at the fraction of the cost of purchasing the hi-tech equivalents.
