Tales on Film

A lot of medium format cameras have a waist level viewfinder. What this means is that instead of looking through a rather small eyepiece with a mirror and a prism projecting the image, you look directly at the image through the mirror. This is convenient in a way, but requires some adjustments.

The first problem you’ll probably face is: “How do I see something in this thing, I can only see myself.” The reason for this is the ground glass you’re looking at. The ground glass is the somewhat milky glass that get’s the projection of the image from the mirror. In most cases this glass has some feature to get a better focus, some have a small magnifier built in the middle. But there are several other methods.

A second problem is the hardest getting used to. Everything you see in the waist level finder is mirrored, this means when you want your camera to photograph a bit more to the right, you need to move it to the left. That’s weird and even after 2 years I’m still sometimes confused.

The biggest advantage of a waist level finder, is probably its size. You are looking in the exact same measurements at what your film will capture. This allows for very precise framing, adjustment of detail and is just marvelous to look at. I even sometimes just walk around while looking in front of me through the WLF.

It also provides for photography from a different angle, this can be both favorable but it can be a great challenge too. As you can see in the photo above, I wanted to shoot from eye-level, but that’s just not very convenient, so you’ll have to be a bit flexible. In retrospect this technique can be quite handy when taking photographs in a crowd. It raises the camera above the crowd while still allowing you to look through it and frame kinda properly.

I do like waist level finders, but as with everything, there are drawbacks. Once used to the different thinking and acting it’s very fun to find new ways to use this. Feel free to share your experiences with this type of viewfinder, do you hate them, love them,…

Hamish Innes-Brown took this photo with a Mamiya c330 on Kodak portra 160nc at Tullamarine airport in Melbourne, Australia.

You can find some more in his amazing flickr-set and is also selling prints of these photos over on Redbubble

Found at Petapixel

At the moment in Aalst, where I happen to live, there is the famous carnival going on. Yesterday during the parade, I got dressed up as a 1920-1930′s photographer, as I have some cameras from that period I took them with me. I went all out and shot 3, almost 4 rolls of film. I shot 2 rolls of 120 and 1 roll of 35mm, the other 35mm is still in the camera. I shot with the Rolleiflex standard 622 and with the Canon AV-1 (I know, this one is not really from the same period, but I needed a 35mm camera too.)

It was a challenge to shoot a moving parade, with people dancing, with a completely manual camera. So I metered a couple of times during the parade, which took about 8 hours to complete the tour, and just set the aperture and shutter time, cocked the shutter and focussed at a certain distance and waited for the subject to hit the spot. I got some hit and miss in between, but I also made some quite good pictures.

During the following days, I will post more photos as they come along.

If you want to see all the photos, go checkout the Flickr-set

Taken by Nasey with a mamiya c220

If you like our website and you are on facebook, become a fan of the Tales on Film fan page. Every once in a while we give away one roll of film among our fans.

Also if you want your analogue work to be featured on the website, join the Tales on Film flickr group and post your analogue photos, every week we post several photos from this group on the website. This is a great way to showcase your work outside flickr and have some other film enthusiasts see and critique your work.

The above photo was taken by PitsLamp photography with a rolleiflex standard 622 on Kodak VPL 100 film