Alright, so today was all about trying to nail this thing I’ve been calling “look 70.” Been on my mind for a bit.
Fired up the usual apps on my phone, you know the drill. Started slapping on filters, messing with those sliders. One was called “Vintage Gold,” another “70s Throwback” or some nonsense. Each one just made my pictures look… well, like they’d had a cheap filter slapped on ‘em. You know what I mean? Fake. Totally artificial.
It got me thinking, right? How did we even get here? My old man, he’s got boxes of photos from back then. Actual 70s. And they just are. They have that vibe, that “look 70” without even trying. No apps, no presets. Just life, caught on film.
Why am I even rambling about this? Well, it ties in. See, he had this beast of a camera. An old Praktica, I think. Weighed a ton. I remember trying to pick it up once when I was a kid, probably like seven or eight, and nearly sent it crashing to the floor. Dad didn’t yell, though. Just showed me how to hold it, real gentle. Said it wasn’t a toy. And those photos he took? They weren’t perfect. Some were a bit blurry, some a bit dark. But they were real. That’s the key word, real.
So, I went back to my own pictures. Tossed out the idea of a one-click fix. Started from scratch. Played with the warmth, dialled it up a bit. Pulled back the saturation – things weren’t so eye-poppingly bright back then, were they? A little bit of grain, yeah, but not that horrible chunky stuff some filters give you. Just a whisper of it.
Then I messed with the contrast, softened the blacks a little. And the focus, that was a big one. Not everything needs to be razor sharp, cutting your eyes out. A tiny bit of softness can actually feel more… inviting. More like a memory.
Took me ages, way longer than just picking a filter. And truth be told, they still don’t look exactly like my dad’s old prints. How could they? Different times, different gear, different eyes behind the lens. But they feel closer to what I was after with “look 70.” They feel a bit more honest, a bit more me trying to get a feel for it, rather than just faking it.
So yeah, that was the mission for “look 70.” Less about the tech, more about the feeling, I guess. Still got a ways to go, probably. But it’s a start. It’s always a start, isn’t it?
