Hello Dolly, It's so nice to see you through an old camera...

A couple of weeks ago I talked about taking pictures through the viewfinder of an old Kodak Duaflex camera of mine to make some (IMO) interesting and old-fashioned-ish-looking portraits. My little experiment, which you can see HERE was in advance of shooting the preview pix for a local production of Hello, Dolly! So the week before I went out of town I shot this session for the Life page this week. Things went great and the look is what I was hoping for. Here are some of my favorites, as well as a gallery with shots of each cast member.



In the layout for the Life page I put together some stereographs of some of the characters who are connected in the play.


Here's the GALLERY

So at the risk of giving up my top secret technique (not really), here's what I did to get these pix.
I attatched an old Kodak Duafelx IV camera (sans flash head) to a tripod at a height that was level with the actors heads. I then positioned a digital camera directly above the view window of the Duaflex, while attached to another tripod. Using a 35mm f2 lens I got an undistorted view of the scene. I manually focused the lens through the viewfinder on the subjects, which were being lit by softbox to their left. The subsequent frames would turn out with big black bars on the sides of the digital frame as the Duaflex would be a square in the middle of the frame. Not only did this allow me to get the nice curved corner square view, but by shooting through the view window on top I also got the dust and crap from the lens and the viewfinder as well which IMO added to the nostalgic feel of the frames. Going along with that I tipped the Duaflex upward on occasion to give a strong vignette look to the bottom of the frame, and overexposed one some to give that random exposure look that was prevalent with these old cameras.
So did it work? I don't know. For this particular assignment I think so. My once regret is that we couldn't get farther away from the wall behind them due to cramped quarters at the theater. I can't see myself using it very often but every great once in awhile it's nice to have a different option.

-DKM