I am deeply impressed by a few photographers using standard DSLR cameras and still achieving amazing vintage look of old 6x6 film cameras.

some portfolios here:
http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/79112.html
http://www.altphotos.com/images/altphotos/43744b70e-99a8-4baa-931d-9e70102f7e1b.jpg
http://www.altphotos.com/images/altphotos/47fbeef53-5d63-4e07-a78b-9d78a93d3521.jpg
http://www.altphotos.com/Gallery.aspx?browseby=search&search=wizard%20in%20black

any ideas how to achieve this? to me it seems like lowering the contrast, very careful desaturation using channels, some painting with light, darkening the corners and some overlay texture, but I still can´t figure it out. also, there´s maybe some kind of artistic filter applied on the blured background, making it look a bit like a sketch (http://www.altphotos.com/images/altphotos/4a15b2ee2-1f71-4981-a4c9-973113beac55.jpg). the low-contrast colors are still a mystery to me. any feedback welcome and please let´s skip things like "desaturate and add noise" :o)

I am just brainstorming, not having actually done this sort of thing with digi images but I have done similar in the past with film and darkroom voodoo. Some of the black and whites look to have subtle solarize and/or double exposure techniques appearance... the former (just off the top of my head) could be replicated with playing around with curves in greyscale mode... I noted the telltale 'halo' artifact in some of the images-typical of traditional solarization, the latter could be the same deal but with another image on a separate layer set to a different blending mode (darken, lighten,etc) at reduced opacity. Hmmm... might try it myself, there are some nice images there.

It looks like desaturated, ajusted to have low key tones and after painted back manually with 3 color layers. You can find easily description of this technique here on "colorization" request.

i messed around a bit and came up with a similar look.

marsha

here's another.

marsha

I think it's mostly 'painting'.
Perhaps what you call: 'painting with light'.

I do not remember my film looking like that :(

painting with light is mostly done :wavey: too much

I won Alien Skin's Exposure software and finally got around to installing it. It's supposed to make digital photos look like film pics. Haven't played with it much. It might be something for you to consider, though.

I used "Power Retouche" filter, blur the background some more, mask a b/w radial fill & burn it.