Making Prints From Toy or Vintage Cameras

Video Transcript

"One technique that I really, really enjoy using, is I use toy cameras. It sounds kind of silly at first, but I use a number of different kind of toy cameras, or sometimes very vintage cameras to get a certain look, an aesthetic look that I really enjoy. Now the negative that I get from these cameras is quite large, it's a 2 1/4 negative. But because the lenses are made of plastic, and frequently not coated, they have a very dreamy, almost surreal look to them, which in some instances, for the type of work I do, really lends itself to it. And in some ways, your negative is still incredibly sharp because it's so big. So you're kind of getting the best of a couple different worlds. And these cameras generally cost me between twenty, tops fifty dollars, so I'm not spending a whole lot of money. Some of the effects I can get from using a plastic camera or a toy camera, like a Holga or a Diana, is this. The image is really, just very dreamy looking. This particular image, the back fell off my camera, and light went through the paper that covers 2 1/4 film and produced these little circles. That's the circles that are on the film. Very happy accident, very lucky for me this happened. Another way that these images are, again, I print them with a sloppy border, a filed-out carrier, and they tend to really soften people out and I just feel that they look beautiful."