Building a Giant Viewfinder

First off, I'm an artist...not an engineer. I tried e-mailing one of these

optics outfits for advice and got a bunch of equations and stuff. Eh, very nice

people but about 4 light years above my head.

 

Recently I've stumbled across a promising technique called "Through The

Viewfinder" photography. Most of the people who do this buy old cameras and

shoot through their viewfinders with a macro lens, I believe.

 

I'm thinking why not build a giant viewfinder instead? Something with plastic

lenses. Fixed focus. Don't care about distortion or anything like that. That

way I could just hold the thing up a couple feet in front of a regular 24mm lens

with one hand and shoot with the other. Again, not looking for top optical

performance here. I may have to have a tube that surrounds the camera lens and

goes to the big homemade viewfinder for obvious reasons, but this won't have to

be a contraption as elaborate as these people have to do.

 

Is what I'm talking about possible? Am I even making sense?

 

Thanks.

Just a thought but if you had an old box camera like a 6x9 format removed the back, then taped some waxed paper or similar on where the film would sit there should be an image there.

Well, if you want a ready-made answer... check out a Graflex camera. They are old press cameras for large format photography. The lenses are interchangible via a lens-board and you can mount whatever the heck kind of lens you want to the front because you can make your own lens-boards out of cardboard or wood. They usually come with a back with ground-glass on it and sometimes even with a built-in hood over the ground-glass, which would shade it to make it easier to photograph. You would still need some kind of close-focus lens on your taking camera, as most standard lenses will not focus close enough to get 4x5" to cover the frame.

 

A similar device could be homemade... a box with a lens on one end and ground glass or wax paper at the other.... basically a camera obscura. Do a search on camera obscura and you will find that people have turned entire vans and even hotel rooms into giant camera obscuras and photographed the results.

Thanks, but that would be large and heavy. Plus there's some reason they say ground glass doesn't work well for this technique...I do not remember why. Don't really want to carry a close focus lens. I'm the type of person who doesn't like to change lenses on the go. If I could just hold it up in front of the camera with one hand that would be good. The contraption I have in my head will fold up and be light weight.

 

Don't really need to fill the frame with it...that size is about right. I can crop down as these will not be large prints and my camera's pretty high resolution.

Perhaps I really have no idea what you are talking about.

 

 

There are a very few TLR cameras from about 50 years ago that used a bizarre optical arrangement for the viewfinder. The Argus 75 is one of them, and Kodak made a few as well.... basically the viewfinder uses a lens instead of a ground glass. The lens comes into focus about 2 feet away from the camera... which is about how far away you hold these kinds of cameras from your eye to focus. I've seen people photographing the viewfinder with these cameras. The lens on the front is not interchangible because the viewfinder itself IS a lens. Some rangefinder cameras use an arrangement like this as well, and VERY tiny ones can be found on box cameras and on some very old folding cameras. But SLR's, most TLR's and view cameras all use a ground glass for focusing against. I don't really see what would be wrong with ground glass?

 

To project an image large enough to photograph it without a macro lens, you would need your primary lens to be from a large format camera and to project onto a screen at least 8x10. The screen could be wax paper or ground glass or clear plastic which has been polished. The other method would be as I suggested, a camera obscura... but it would have to be a large one to photograph it without a close focus lens again. In this arrangement you would build a box, put the lens at the front, a white screen at the back, and peek your camera through the top somewhere to photograph the screen.

 

Perhaps examples of what you are talking about would help.

On second thought, after reading your original post... why not just shoot through an 8x10 fresnel lens?

I know "through the viewfinder photography" and love the effects. However, I cannot for the life of me understand what you mean. If you do, just try it!