Shooting Digital Retro-Style

A Photography Wander

So, a little explanation. Years ago - like maybe a decade? - a friend gave me a whole bunch of creative filters which are designed for a film camera. They have a nifty little adapter you slide them into that screws on the front of the lens. Fast forward to today, I’m trying to find something, I rediscover them in my photography kit cabinet. I look at them very closely for the first time in many years. Huh. I think I can use these with my little Macro lens I’ve been shooting a lot... Oh! That is fun!

Daylilies in my garden shot through a heart-shaped frame. Canon R100, TT Artisan 40mm Macro, Conkin A pre-shaped frame.

I am not, I should probably say before I get too far into this, a photography geek, maybe a nerd, but most likely a dork on the diagram. I have certain specialized interests, and I know a fair amount about those, but I’m a little looser on other parts of my hobby. If you’re looking for technical accuracy, you’re not finding it here.

That being said, I realized while I was puttering around in the garden gleefully being insect paparazzi as I often like to do, I am currently shooting a very old-school rig on a totally new-school body. I’m about to up that game, too, but that’s a different post. For today’s exercise, I’m out there with an all-manual macro lens mounted on a mirrorless digital body. I have to say, being able to turn on focus peaking and have the viewfinder LCD tell me what bits are sharp? Game changer. Worth the money I paid for this little camera a couple of years ago. Which is why I’m happy with the cheap little chunk of glass I’m shooting through. I can set it and then use my body to bring my subject into focus. Since I’m often shooting insects on the fly, this is really important.

Swallowtail caterpillars, shot through the Conkin spot-violet filter.

It’s not just focus I’m adjusting on the fly, it’s shutter speed and aperture to control how much light is getting in. These little filters add a bit of a challenge to that, since they further limit the light if I’m using a darker filter or one of the precut frames. It was fun to play around and see what came out.

Robin in the garden, shot through a Conkin Coef. +3 Sepia

Sure, it’s not the same as shooting on film. I can’t afford to shoot film right now! I’ve toyed with learning how to develop my own film, which is something my grandmother used to do, with me sitting on the washer in her bathroom/laundry/darkroom watching her work on it. That was cool, and I’ve been a chemist, I think I can handle darkroom chemicals and precise timing. Still, the time to learn, not to mention the upfront investment of tools and materials? For a hobby I’m likely to do a few times a year? I do have a reason. One of the few things I have from Dad is his old Minolta camera. And I have a 1951 Exakta Varex, which is a weird and wonderful piece of kit. Future Cedar can play around with that. For today, I realized I could go retro on the cheap.

These are the Conkin filters I have, each carefully kept in a rigid plastic sleeve case. There’s enough here to keep me busy exploring what they can do for a while! If I do play with film in the future, I’ll have worked out what does what on the digital cheaply before I try them on the ‘spensive film spools.

The only filter here I can’t use for Digital is the Double Exposure, which I certainly can use with the Exakta, as it’s a manual advance so shooting half dark, flipping the filter, then shooting again should have really interesting results. I started out in life shooting film. Dad handed me a crappy little cartridge camera when I was about six, and from there I happily shot cheap cameras until the early 2000s when I acquired my first (crappy) little digital. I broke out of point-and-shoot and into the first digital DSLR I’d owned in about 2015. I have rarely looked back.

The Conkin filter cassette, with lens hood. You can slide one or two or three of the square filters, or the special precut-frame cartridge, into this to hold it in front of your lens at the proper distance.

This is the fun thing about a digital body, though. I can set it up to be all manual, shooting in RAW and jpg files to allow me loads of flexibility in developing, custom white balance to keep the digital sensor from freaking out when you put funny colors in front of it, and of course, focus peaking. Then I can run around my garden playing, burn a few dozen exposures, and come inside to develop from the comfort of my office chair. This is the only thing I miss Lightroom for, really, but I’ll make do with Affinity Photo rather than deal with Adobe.

The small heart pre-cut frame is a black cardstock loaded in a cartridge. I know I could easily create custom frames to use in this, that would be fun!

Now, you can absolutely get similar effects digitally. I have the Nik collection, and a couple of others like it, and use them when doing art photos digitally developed. They are a lot of fun, and I enjoy playing around until the whole composition clicks and then maybe adding too much but it’s digital so I can just back up to where I liked it. Unlike a painting where you overwork it and too bad, start over, digital is almost endlessly forgiving. Maybe that’s why I’m going to play with the filter set, and the manual lens, and have got another project in mind I’ll share once I have all the components in hand.

Constraints strengthen creativity.

Shooting through the heart frame, but at a different aperture, changes the vignette radically.

The harder you neck down what you can do, the more your brain says ‘yeah, and? I’ll do it anyway!’ or at least, that’s how it works for me. Challenging yourself is a great way to cut through some of the analysis paralysis. For me, cutting the cost down to a no-risk helps, too, because with the film I’d be worried about making just the right shot to be worthy of the frame I’ve just devoted to it. Digital? I can take it, look at it instantly, adjust, look again, and also I can put it on burst mode and burn three frames while an insect is moving so one of them might be in focus.

Honeybee on Borage blooms, shot through the heart frame.

Work with what you have. Creative doesn’t have to mean expensive. Use the tools at hand, whatever they might be. Let your brain spit and sputter a little, until something catches fire and you are off and running!