Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye, Eye
I like you verrrry much…
Thank you Carmen, I like you too. And I like the idea of having a viewfinder window on my cameras. Call me a tiresome old retrographer, but the idea of pointing and shooting without any real idea of where the lens is looking is anathema.
Even my first camera - a 127 Brownie - had a metal tunnel with my eye at one end of it and the world at the other. I was allowed to see a small portion of this, which I could capture on Verichrome Pan. With my digital shots I want as least as much as this.
The finder mechanisms vary - DSLRS have mirrors which flap up and down ( or in the case of a certain old batch of Canon 1Ds, down… ), mirror-less let you see what the electronics see, and the smaller compacts sometimes just give you a plastic tunnel. The most frustrating have only the LCD screen and you must hold the camera delicately to see anything. In bright sun you can relax, because you see nothing anyway.
Straight optics that let you see the real world are rare - Leica and Fujifilm being two of the few. This is good if you need to see action without the tiny time delay of an EVF system. They all say there is no delay, but then they all say they’ll respect you in the morning…
The best you can do is find a finder that let’s you adjust for your own bad eyesight. Some cameras compel you to buy a diopter lens to correct the image. Most have a thumb wheel that will fix it.
The dear old Graphic press cameras had a wire finder and a peep sight that were crudely perfect. You never doubted with a wire finder. 8 feet, f:8, and run for it after the flash went off.
You rarely doubted with Leica M cameras, either, and aftert you mastered the subtle messages the shapes and images were giving you, you could predict depth of field as well as sharp focus.
Best of all, Leica M’s could be fine tuned by local repairmen.
All text and images by Richard Stein
