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much ado about the vintage feel

much ado about the vintage feel - January 3, 2011

Before I continue my irregular thesis working hours.

It’s been 5-6 years since I forayed into photography. I admit that in my five years of “experience”, 90% of it was just playing around, shooting stuff however I liked to. But those five years give me enough street cred to say that I’ve taken the long route of beginner-dom. I’ve made all the rookie mistakes, never knew the difference between center-weighted and evaluative metering modes (until some months ago), took pictures of flowers & figurines at home, pointed my flash at an awkward angle (giving my subjects this ugly cast shadow), and many, many more embarrassing habits.

So I’m not saying that I haven’t tried the “vintage feel” on my photos. I have and admittedly, it looks nice almost all of the time. It even works better than black-and-white, the classic pick me up for most photographs.

Vintage Feel!

This is just a picture of trash being swept into a dustpan. The transformation is undeniable.

It’s all a matter of slathering on a dark, almost black layer of blue on top of your existing photo and changing the blending mode to “Exclusion”. Some people try the same technique, but use it to bring out the browns and yellows in the white spaces of the photo. It gives off this muted light that can only be naturally achieved, I don’t know, maybe at 5pm in a summer afternoon on an open field? Somehow, it always, always looks good. 70% of all popular photos on Tumblr (and basically everywhere) have this effect done on them.

You know how old photographs printed on good old photo paper always look so nice, even if they’re blurry, unfocused, or wrongly composed. But there is merit to their aesthetic sensibility, they’re old, and thus have satisfied the goal of photography to freeze a scene over the passage of time.

Maybe this explains our fascination with the vintage feel. Our current digital photographs will never fade into the muted yellow that we find so attractive, unless we print them out (which we rarely do), so we seek out ways to feel nostalgia in our photography. I get it.

All’s good with it then, so what’s my problem?

Simply overuse, and how this kind of post-processing could possibly hamper the more vital aspects of photography. Simply put, post-processing has definitely spoiled Generation Y. Only a few of us were able to really use the film camera. By the time we were of age, the very first digital cameras were already out in the market.

Frankly speaking, it’s become the easy way out for many enthusiasts. With this effect, almost nothing seems like a bad photograph. I mean, it’s like HDR, but worse. At least HDR takes some significant effort to pull off. It’s just about as bad as slathering bokeh into every single photo you take, just so it looks “artsy” and “DSLR-ish”

People try claiming it as a style that they’ve embraced. But I for one, agree that before one settles on a style, should have all the basics covered. The thing that irks me the most is the possibility of people compromising correct exposure and composition because they could easily fix it with this effect, or worse, claim that their most basic photographic mistakes were done on purpose, to achieve that devil-may-care feel of “vintage” photographs.

“Oh, a broken head in my photo! It’s ok! I’m gonna edit it later”

“Oh, it turned out too white, it’s ok, I’m gonna make it bluish brown naman later”

“Oh a photo of a chair! Doesn’t look artsy enough, I’ll just give it a vignette and add a brown layer then Screen!”

I’m not saying that one should be overly traditional in the pursuit of photographic color and exposure, just that one should explore all territory and not remain in that stagnating pool of just one style. It took professional photographers years to figure out that grain is nice, that unfocused shots work sometimes, that composition can go beyond the rule of thirds. I know that as photographers and artists, we all have to settle with one style eventually. But I can say with force that a style only holds water if one has veritable experience in exploring the field. (I blame this generation of online showmanship, everyone knows how to market themselves! It’s something I never learned how to do for myself haha).

Don’t even get me started on talking about this generation of showmanship, I have many many things to say about that.

Metro Manila light is so texturized, warm and nice, why should we change it?

I digress, apart from respecting the value of experimentation, respecting true to life color. Our photographs have all eternity to age and wither into that vintage feel, so why rush it now? Remember that even the old photographs we love so much now, were taken in the past with all its vibrancy. Real, living and breathing color is beautiful the way it is. Photography is supposed to communicate, not contrive.

Yun lang. So here is the awkward end to my little discourse. Let me know what you think, hahaha :)