Viewfinders

Viewfinders

by William Lulow

At the risk of stating the obvious, photographing someone or something involves seeing! The process also involves the necessity for some kind of aparatus for viewing and capturing. So, we have “viewfinders” to help us point the lens in the right direction to capture what we are aiming at. Today, they are usually of the horizontal, rectangular type found in most digital cameras. There are various kinds of course, but most are of the 35mm film frame size. This means that the cameras are kind of modeled on the old 35mm rangefinder or SLR cameras of the past. A viewfinder, as a rectangle has a length and a width. These are referred to as an “aspect ratio” and, in these cameras, are fairly close in this ratio to the size of a 4×6” print. Problem is that that’s not the only way to “see” something.

I loved my old 4×5” view cameras because they were much closer in aspect ratio to the prints I made in the darkroom (usually 16×20”). As a matter of fact they were the same. Often in the photographic process, the “frame” around the image itself can be both limiting and defining. Richard Avedon certainly wasn’t the first, but he became known for including the frame as part of the image. Compositionally, he most likely did this to make his viewers aware of the film part of his imagery.

It is significant because with digital imagery there is no frame other than the very real limitations of what the eye can see in the viewfinder. And, it is often difficult for the eye to see every part of the viewfinder like it can when it examines a groundglass. So, photographers have to be especially careful to examine the camera’s LCD image to check for accurate composition. You can, of course add a frame to any digital image after the shot is taken, but it’s not quite the same thing.

What I’m driving at with all this philosophy on seeing is that the frame should be an integral element in the process of creating a photographic image because it determines how viewers react to the picture itself. And, therefore photographers should be aware of its ability to direct what viewers see.

When you take a picture, you are not always aware of how you will use the image in the end. But you should always be aware of the frame and how the viewfinder can be used to aid composition.

Here is an image that was composed very carefully:

When doing these kinds of images (panoramas) you have to pay close attention to the points within the image that need to overlap in order to create the precise files that a computer program can combine easily. So, you need to be aware of the extremities of each frame and then purposefully overlap them. This image was created from two almost identical ones. The viewfinder was used to compose them carefully, then they were checked on the camera’s LCD.

This image looks like a random shot, but it was carefully lined up in the viewfinder so that the chairs reached the end of the viewfinder’s frame.

So one advantage of taking the time to compose carefully and use the full extent of your camera’s viewfinder is that you obtain images that often don’t have to be cropped. This can save a great deal of computer time when you need to deal with many images from a shoot. Also, images carefully composed can be edited much more judiciously to create the type of picture you actually intend to make.