Photographic accessories are often plagued by high prices, as photography is considered a rich man’s game. It doesn’t have to be that way though, and [Snappiness] is here to get you started on the route to cheaper kit with a waist-level viewfinder project.
If you’ve used a twin-lens reflex camera then you should be familiar with a waist level viewfinder, it’s a lens and mirror arrangement allowing the photographer to frame the shot looking down from above. Modern cameras often have no viewfinder, so this is aimed at digital compacts without flip-up screens.
It has three components, all available for relatively low prices, and mounted in a 3D printed case. There’s a prime lens, a mirror, and a Fresnel lens forming the part the photographer looks through. It’s a simple device, but still one which would cost a lot more off the shelf. The video is below the break.
It might interest you to know that this is not the first viewfinder project we’ve brought you for digital cameras.
Great job. I remember the first time I looked down a medium format hassleblad when I was a kid and thought wow! Absolutely worth trying to build one myself, even if just something to show the kids.
I used to have a 35mm Kyocera Yashica T5 with a waist-level viewfinder. It was basically just a thumbnail-sized curved mirror matching the camera’s (fixed) FoV, but it worked surprisingly well. Since you can see what you’re looking at, even a tiny image is good enough to locate the scene in the frame.
Fun little project, but pronunciation of “Fresnel” is the shibboleth.
“I just wanna learn about how optics work anyway.”
Admirable goal. A long way to go. He accomplished a long way on near zero understanding, so it’s a promising start. I hope he keeps at it.
“Modern cameras often have no viewfinder”
That’s just not true. Less than a quarter of cameras sold in 2024 had built-in lenses, and even in that category some have viewfinders.
https://petapixel.com/2024/07/02/worldwide-digital-camera-market-hits-a-three-year-high/
Nice tip !
Here in France, the video has an ignoble translation (in french) by a dumb machine weirdly speaking that sometimes get an 1,5 x speed boost, too ugly, couldn’t get to the end of it !
I’l try it with a disposable camera lens
LCD over optical, it already contains levels
Sadly it’s not a TTL finder (i.e. doesn’t show you the actual view the taking lens would see), so this is a glorified Watson finder.
An alternative would be to take the image from the existing TTL finder (i.e. the bit you look through) and reproject it onto a ground glass screen.
Go ahead and try that: You’ll find the image far too dim to be useful.
Some SLR cameras (Pentax LX, Nikon F2, Canon F1, and probably a few others) offered interchangeable viewfinders, including top-view waist-level ones. Ironically, most useful when holding the camera overhead.
There was a while that you could get a weenie camera that clipped on the viewfinder and transmitted an image to a display monitor (usually a CRT, which dates the concept.). Pointless now, in the age of USB and wifi-connected cameras, but useful for some applications in that narrow slice of time where small TV cameras and film SLRs and CRT displays coexisted.