I Now Know What TTV Photos Means

Narrator: Tabitha of The Pairabirds

I was wondering how to create vintage looking photos. The ones that I really liked had a black, slightly out of focus frame around the image. And, these photos were labeled as TTV. I should have saved myself some time by looking up what the letters TTV stood for. Instead, I assumed it was a special kind of camera.

Well, I spent 45 minutes futzing with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to try to make these black frames. As I was surfing the net for a tutorial on making the frame in Photoshop, I happened to come across a TTV style photo. The artist wrote underneath the picture, "This is a TTV. Through the Viewfinder. I took this picture through the viewfinder of another camera."

That's all. No fancy Illustrator filter. No Photoshop effect. Just a photographer's favorite media, two cameras.

TTV, through the viewfinder, is a picture of an object taken with one camera through the lens of a second camera.

I stripped my house down trying to find an alternative to a camera lens. I only have one camera. Until I remembered the Kodak disposable camera I still have from two years ago gathering dust particles on my top shelf.

I grabbed the first item I saw, my beatup Pikachu keychain, and snapped away with my Sony Cybershot and Kodak. The outcome of the photos looks like a filmstrip. I'm excited about turning the photos into black and white images (now I can use my limited Photoshop skills), creating a film noir screenshot. I plan on practicing more with this technique.