Does anyone have any ideas about what I could use for an inexpensive optical finder with a field of view equal to a 25mm lens on a 35mm camera (i.e. same horizontal angle of view as a 90 on 4x5, 180 on 8x10, 360 on 12x20, etc...). I've made several non-optical finders of various focal lengths out of cardboard, etc., but for wide angles they're less than satisfactory for a couple of reasons. I thought about buying the dedicated finder that Voigtlander sells with their 25mm Skopar lens for their Bessa-L camera, but it's not exactly free. Maybe if I could find a cheap little plastic point and shoot with a 24mm lens I could cut the finder out of it and use that, but I haven't yet found one. Maybe there's an old Graphic finder of the correct focal length that I could use?

Any thoughts?

-- Mark Parsons (Polar@thegrid.net), June 30, 2000

Answers

Actually the same horizontal as 83.3mm on 4x5. None of the Graflex or inexpensive Linhof finders go that wide.

-- Bill Mitchell (bmitch@home.com), July 01, 2000.

The Graflex finders did come with an optional accessory to let you go to 90mm but they're rare as hens teeth and not exactly describable with the adjective 'cheap'... If you can do the necessary calculations, you could probably buy a Graflex viewfinder for a few bucks and then get an additional lens from Edmund Scientific and put that on front of the viewfinder. Good luck. DJ

-- N Dhananjay (ndhanu@umich.edu), July 01, 2000.

What about thoes Hobo's you see in View Camera. They use a peep-hole for a doorway. What's the angle of a peep-hole? Dean

-- Dean Lastoria (dvlastor@sfu.ca), July 04, 2000.

Bolex cameras used to come with side mounted range finders. They had various configurations - usually 12/25/50 or variations thereof. The 12 setting would presumably equal a 25 as it's close to half "normal" for 16 mm.

-- Sean yates (yatescats@yahoo.com), July 04, 2000.