Tuesday Artist Spotlight - Scarlet Beautiful Photography

I had never heard of TTV photography before I joined Etsy. TTV means through the viewfinder, and it's a style of photography where you shoot through the viewfinder of an old camera, usually a TLR camera with a waist-level viewfinder. The end result is an image laden with all the imperfections of the glass in the viewfinder that is usually cropped square by camera you are shooting through. Russ Morris has a great tutorial on TTV Photography on his site: http://www.russmorris.com/ttv/.

So that gets me to this week's spotlight artist.



Tenika of Scarlet Beautiful knows how to make a great TTV image. What's tricky about TTV photography is picking subjects that work well for that format. Because of it's almost antique, dreamy look, choosing the right subject becomes really important.

What I find most attractive about TTV photographs is the nostalgic mood they elicit. This mood works perfectly in Tenika's images that focus on travel. Her series on welcome signs you'd encounter if you were just crossing a state border work really well in the TTV format:





My favorite travel shot from that series has to be the Kansas one:



The soft antique feel of the TTV photograph also works really well when shooting flowers as Tenika shows in these two images:





Easily the best part of being on Etsy has been getting exposed to wonderful art by members of the Photographers of Etsy team. I recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex II of my own to try TTV photography with, but that experiment comes at the end of a long list of things to do so it might be a while before I get any shots made. Still, it's great to look at work from artist like Tenika to get inspired.

Pay a visit to Tenika's Etsy shop to see more of her great photography.