Through the Viewfinder

The inspiration for this post comes from cardboard. Strobist and cardboard go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you add in some duct tape you have just about any light modifier. Any time I have a camera out you can be sure my 16 month old son Elijah is going to be reaching for it. He likes anything with buttons and especially things with buttons that he is not supposed to play with. To try and solve this for a moment I grabbed some cardboard that had a hole in it, folded down the sides and make a fake camera. The hole lined up nicely to be a right eye viewfinder.



Before handing it over I started looking at the world though this cardboard viewfinder. It amazed me how quickly I became disconnected from the world around me and became a viewer. It's much the same feeling I get when shooting with my SLRs. It's also something I find to be completely missing from shooting with a Point & Shoot.



I have many cameras and they are used for different things, most of the images in this post are shot with my LX3 point & shoot. It's tiny, Strobist friendly, and shoots RAW. I can fit it in a cargo pocket and not worry about it, Try that with a 40D. It just amazed me how different the feeling is when you shoot looking though a frame vs. looking at a screen. I would think the screen would feel more disconnected but it doesn't. Even as I write this post I am still playing with the cardboard view finder. The aspect of the hole is about 1:1. It's not an aspect I shoot a lot but I found myself wanting too after using the viewfinder. I also saw scenes that I wished I could press the shutter down and save.

I encourage those of you reading this to grab some cardboard, cut a hole in it and look at the world. You never know what you might see.