Framing

... blog post:

Ever since I bought my first 'proper' camera, my Yashica Electro 35 GX, in 1976 I have been hooked on rangefinder cameras for one specific reason which has kept me using a long succession of them ever since.

That reason was the ability to frame my picture with bright line frames representing the field of view of the lens attached to the camera in the rangefinder's optical viewfinder. Placing that frame over the view in the finder as an aid to composition just clicked for me and after that there was just no turning back.

Yes I do understand that these bright line frames give only an approximate representation of what the camera lens actually 'sees' and yes I do get the fact that because automatic parallax correction for close up focusing is applied to these bright frames the mechanism causes the fov to be shown more accurately close up than at infinity where they indicate that there will be less in your final image than in reality. But I still am hooked on bright line framing just these days on my Leica M10-R.

So here I am still superimposing a bright line frame over a view of the world in an optical viewfinder to help me compose a picture of a 3-D subject as a 2-D image to create a photograph. Only now it's on digital media instead of on 'analogue' film.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. That's your actual French.