The View Finder

From the misty mountains of China...




To the far off humps and bumps of the West where the blu-tack roams free ...




From a David Hockney stage-set...



To my favourite phone-box...




The campus is full of miniature adventures, to which a Panasonic GF1 with an electronic viewfinder is ideally suited.

Although I had found a used GF1 at a good price, I had not bothered to find an electronic viewfinder on the grounds that most people seemed to regard it as a bit of failure in terms of size and resolution -- rather like looking at a neighbour's TV through a telescope, was the general view. However, I began to feel that if one was available it couldn't be that bad, and could be very useful. In my comparison of the GF1 and the Olympus E-P1, one counter-intuitive thing I had discovered, for example, was that the lower-resolution LCD screen of the Olympus is much more visible in sunlight than that of the Panasonic, despite its higher resolution and alleged viewability. Couple that with the E-P1's built-in image stabilisation, and it was becoming clear which would be, for me, the longer-term purchase. Unless the Panasonic viewfinder was better than most people were saying.

Well, "most people" are wrong, in my view. Having found one at a good price, I am smitten with the way the viewfinder transforms the usability and enjoyability of this camera. What do I care about the quality of the image seen through it? I'm taking photographs, not admiring the view. Have you ever tried to use a medium-format "Waist level" viewfinder outdoors? Never mind a TV through a telescope, that is like trying to watch football through a home-made periscope. You just get used to it, laterally-reversed image and all.

What really counts is that I can hold the camera like a camera, stabilizing it against my face with a technique I perfected long ago, and -- even better -- can see exactly what I'm framing while reading off the exposure data. If necessary, I can turn it up through 90 degrees, or press the little button and revert to LCD viewing. I'm seeing an immediate improvement in the sharpness and compositional tightness of my pictures taken with the GF1. It more than compensates for the lack of in-body image stabilisation.

I'd rather it was built in to the camera body of course, and maybe future models will go down that road. But I have to say there is something appealing about taking out and assembling my kit -- camera, lens, viewfinder, lens hood -- like a fisherman assembling his rod, reel, float and weights, then baiting the hook in high anticipation on the riverbank.