70/365: The Light Goes Both Ways.

Trying to think of a shot today, I spied my old Yashica Mat, the busted one that doesn't work anymore, sitting on the table. Hmm. Thought I'd try something.

The Yashica is a TLR camera, Twin Lens Reflex. As a opposed to an SLR, which uses a mirror to show you what the one lens is seeing until you press the shutter, when the mirror flips up and lets the light pass straight from lens to film plane or sensor, the TLR uses one lens for the film, and one lens for the viewer. The top lens goes thru a prism or mirror to angle the image up 90 degrees, so you can hold the camera at your waist and see the image. Normally the light goes into the lens, but I thought it might be interesting to reverse the norm...

To get the light shining out of both lenses, I needed to light both, and that meant 2 speedlights. Had to open the camera as if I was loading film, and stick one speedlight up in there for the bottom lens. Then I balanced the second speedlight on a pocketwizard, on the open film back, to shine into the waist-level viewer. One final speedlight in a Lumiquest softbox III gave some definition to the camera surface, and I puffed some talcum powder up to add a bit of texture to the air. Gotta love the smell of Clubman.

-llg