Waist-level finder

A waist-level viewfinder is a technical device for cameras - mostly medium or large format cameras.

With SLR cameras, the image is projected onto a focusing screen ( ground glass ) to enable the photographer to assess and focus of the subject. The dial is located relative to the optical axis of the objective lens is pivoted about 90 degrees at the top of the camera.

With a waist-level viewfinder it is possible to look directly on top of the focusing screen. The light well also darkens the bright ambient light and therefore helps to better see the picture. The most common form of the light shaft has a foldable structure, which forms four side walls erected. Often it is a magnifying glass to enlarge the image on the focusing screen from one of the side walls fold out or put a viewfinder (with or without metering ) with a pentaprism ( roof prism ) and insight from behind the light well.

In medium format cameras can be the front of the viewfinder hood often fold back; the horizontal review is traditionally referred to as a sports finder (which is the real background, that the laterally inverted image and the attitude of the viewfinder hood hardly suitable for fast moving subjects ).

The image appears upright in the waist-level viewfinder, but reversed.

This Sucherart is offered in some professional film cameras and many medium format cameras. From a photographic point of view of the viewfinder hood offers several advantages:

• Through the insight from the top of the camera recordings can be made easier from a lower recording position ( eg for portrait photography).
• Many people feel less bothered by taking pictures when the photographer looks with the head down into the light shaft, instead of "point" directly to the camera on the model.

• With longer follow-up period, for example in nature photography, the use of a viewfinder hood for the eyes is much more relaxing.
• Shots near the ground ( worm's eye view ) or overhead (over top of an obstacle ) must be constructed naturally easier with a LS, but an angle finder on the prism finder has about the same effect.

Cons:

• Portrait shots are freehand almost impossible because the mirror- movements are hard to control, so the waist-level viewfinder especially with medium format cameras 6 x 6 is common where there is not a portrait format.
• The avant-garde Russian Photographer Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (1891-1956) polemicised already in the 1920s against the " navel perspective" that enforces the Lichtschachtsucher almost regularly and did in the design of his shots everything to thwart just this.

In contrast to traditional viewfinders but is found in most small SLR cameras instead of a light well a viewfinder that allows the view of the dial has a fixed pentaprism or a corresponding mirror system. To ensure that only an insight of the back of the camera in the detector is possible. To gain insight from the top in this viewfinder to allow (or be able to make good use of, for example, on a copy stand to the camera ), Angle Finder are available.

High- KB - system cameras offer interchangeable viewfinder, so that here viewfinders can be used.

Edixa reflex -B, with open Lichtschachtsucher

Edixa reflex -B, Lichtschachtsucher and unfolded Lupe

Edixa reflex -B, without looking purity ( = Change viewfinder)

• Camera technology