James Warner Shoots From the Hip with This 3D-Printable Waist-Level Optical Viewfinder
If you're looking to get a lower angle on things without breaking your back, print one of these for the camera of your choice.
Vintage digital camera enthusiast James Warner has released 3D print files and instructions for adding a waist-level viewfinder to any camera — making shooting from the hip and actually capturing your subject significantly easier.
"An optical waist-level viewfinder […] allows a photographer to hold the camera at their waist and frame the shot by looking down into the camera, rather than holding it up to their eye, and it's practical for certain types of shooting," Warner explains of the project's inspiration, "but it's also just plain magical if you've never had the opportunity to look down through one before."
Traditionally, an optical viewfinder — whether through-the-lens or dedicated — lets someone whose face is pushed up against the rear of the camera see what's visible at the front. Early digital cameras included direct optical viewfinders, while digital single-lens reflex (DLSR) cameras use a through-the-lens system — but in both cases they're not visible from anywhere other than behind the camera. Later models of digital camera included live-view digital displays, and later models still added the ability to tilt these displays to various angles — but Warner's approach is a lot more analog.
"There are some [viewfinders] you can buy online," Warner explains, "but they're pretty expensive and limited to only certain focal lengths." The solution: building your own, using a 3D-printed framework holding a magnifying Fresnel lens and a mirror, pulling light in from a lens at the front of the camera and redirecting it upwards towards a viewer above, rather than behind, the camera.
Warner's designs, which have been released for free, produce a dedicated optical viewfinder that sits atop the camera as a cold-shoe accessory. Variants with 18mm and 25mm convex lenses have been released, both of which use a 25×25mm square mirror to redirect the light and a 30×30mm Fresnel lens with 28mm focal length. The resulting image makes it easy to frame the shot — though comes at the cost of everything being mirrored, for obvious reasons.
The project is documented in full in Warner's video, embedded above and on his YouTube channel; links to STL files, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, are available on his Buy Me a Coffee page.