An Objective View of the View Finder

The view finder is probably the most important part of the camera. It’s your connection to what the camera is seeing, what it’s focusing on, and what your shot is going to look like. It’s one of the most crucial parts in taking a good photo. Unfortunately though, it tends to get ignored, amid the jabber on pixels, sensors, and frames per-second. Those things are important, but I don’t think that the viewfinder has been treated with the importance that its due. As if to prove my point further, I noticed while browsing through camera specs, the viewfinder specs where the ones most often left out!

In this post I’d like to talk more about the view finder, and some of the things that make a good one (or a bad one). Now, to completely honest, this post was born out of my curiosity to learn more about the viewfinder and not my immense store of knowledge, but I try my best to explain things as simply as I can!

Downtown Signs

Downtown has been an fascinating place to take photos. Trying to find the beautiful in the ordinary is a great challenge and exercise for any photographer. Photos of signs are particularly interesting to me, because we see them so much that we usually don't see them as art, but a good photo can change that.

The Anvil fence sign was particularly striking because of its boldness. There were a few ways that I went about it. 1. I wanted the word to fill the whole frame because it was crucial to portraying the bold effect I was trying to go for. If I had left a border around the sign, it wouldn't have created the same effect. 2. I didn't shoot the sign straight on, but tilted my camera upwards a tad which created a partial illusion that the words were wider than they really were.

Shore Lodge, McCall

Recently our family took a trip to Shore Lodge. What a great place to take pictures! I didn't get out to any special sites, but there were plenty of beautiful pictures right outside the lodge.I got a chance to use my new polarizer, and was very much impressed with effect. Basically it acts like sunglasses for your camera. It creates deeper blues in the sky and increases saturation and contrast, as well as removing glare and unwanted reflection. Since I don't have a dual-grad filter*, but I played around and discovered that a polarizer filter can be used similar effect. I have a circular polarizer, which when rotated on the lens, can produce a brighter sky or darker sky. In order to get the sky and land at similar exposures I rotated the filter until the sky was slightly darker and then snapped the photo.

One of the things I tried to incorporate into my photos in this trip particularly was using a foreground. If I had just taken a photo of the mountains and the lake, tightly zoomed in, it would have looked pretty boring. But by including different objects like the light and docks int the foreground the picture is visually pleasing with multiple layers vs just the lake and mountains, which would be relatively flat by comparison.

*A dual-grad filter like a polarizer fits on the end of a lens, but half the filter being clear and the other half slightly tinted. The tinted half is used to block some of the light from the sky so that both the sky and the ground are both properly exposed. With out it, sunset pictures tend to have the sky exposed right, but the ground is usually dark and underexposed.

Sunrise, Lake Lowell

For the last couple of days I've been doing some more reading on panoramas, landscapes and how to make photos sharper. I couldn't wait to try some of the stuff out, so I got up this morning and biked down to one of my favorite locations, Lake Lowell. I got up around 6:00 am, so that way I could take advantage of the nice soft light of dawn, and of course get photos of the sunrise. When I got there the sky was still a little gray. That gives a little challenge, because colors tend not to be as bright and contrasting in overcast light. However, after a few minute the sun came over the horizon, suddenly the sky turned yellow/red, giving everything a very nice warm tint.

Something I've been trying out lately has been a tripod. I've had one for a long time, but haven't used a whole lot. If you look at a lot of landscape photos, everything from front to back is in focus. To get this photographers have to use a high aperture, and because they're shooting at dawn or dusk to take advantage of the soft light, they have to use a slow shutter speed to get the right amount of light. Since it's impossible to hold a camera and take a picture with these settings. Every landscape photographer uses a tripod. For the longest time I was wondering why my landscapes weren't turning out right. They'd be blurry, or most often, not sharp. After I read what I was doing wrong, I always pack along a tripod when I think I'm going to be taking landscape photos! 

By the way, check out my first panorama!