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As Good

as Old

Make digital photographs look as if your great-grandfather took them. By Richard Kadrey

Once upon a time, photographers took pictures on a delicate, wonky medium called “film,” which was plagued with defects such as dust, scratched negatives, grain, and colors that faded with time.

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Digital photography eliminated those defects, yet somehow the photographs didn’t quite look like photographs anymore. I found that I missed many of the dirty, human elements of film, so I ended up putting them back into my squeaky-clean digital shots. Here are some tips on how you, too, can ruin, damage, and age modern pictures that look too good to be true.

Your primary tool will be a program such as Photoshop or GIMP, either of which allows you to use layers. (GIMP is a powerful and free Photoshop substitute available for download from gimp.org.) Layers are stacks of images that can be superimposed like old-fashioned transparencies. You blend them to create something weird and new.

Photography by Richard Kadrey

1. COLLECT TEXTURES TO ADD TO YOUR PHOTO I’ve been shooting cracked concrete, stained floors, ^A peeling paint, wood, and rusting metal for over 10 years, and have an extensive library I can dip into. If you don’t have your own textures, you can find them free at sites such as deviantart.com, or you can buy high-quality images cheaply from a stock photo company such as iStockphoto ( istockphoto.com).

B

Fig. A: The final photo, after all the tweaks and modifications. Fig. B: The original photo, as taken by the author.

2. SELECT A SUITABLE PHOTO I decided to work with a shot I took of a model at a San Francisco train station. I wanted an image that looked something like a photographic version of one of Paul Delvaux’s surrealist sleepwalker paintings.

Make: 91