"Re-photography"

As the capabilities of digital cameras improve, enabling clearer, more detailed photos than perhaps ever before, I often find myself searching for ways to (re-)introduce imperfections into the images I capture and create.

I call the technique I've been using most often as of late "re-photography". Not to be confused with the practice of attempting to photograph well-known scenes from exactly the same location as the originals, this is more akin to dubbing music from one cassette to another. The results tend to be more or less the same, but with slightly less clarity and a bit more noise than the original.

There are probably several ways to achieve this effect; the way I do it is to photograph images displayed on my computer screen. If I use my digital camera, I generally need to adjust the focus slightly so that the LCD segments don't show so much (unless that's the effect I want); that's less of a concern if I use my iPod. To accentuate the effect, I can edit the images in my iPod (Pixlr-o-matic and BeFunky are perfect for this), then photograph those results with a digital camera if I want a larger image.