Through the 'Viewfinder'

Keeping in line with the title of the blog, here's one 'Observation'. The title, I find is very apt but I cannot take the entire credit for it. My inspiration is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson or his pseudonym Lewis Carroll and his book 'Through the Looking Glass". I don't intend to analyze anything here by prying into something with a looking-glass or a viewfinder. I merely intend to make a very funny observation.

Cameras. The cameras available today would make a man 10 years ago go crazy. Such has been the development. I remember when I got my first digital camera in 2003, people didn't know how to use it. The concept of capturing the image by composing through the screen was completely novel. People would invariably try to look through the viewfinder and would get really confused to find that the viewfinder was not turned on. People might even find this surprising that there used to be an option in the earlier digital cameras, the point-and-shoot ones, to switch between the viewfinder and the screen. Point-and-shoot cameras today have no such option. It is just the LCD screen.

I bought a digital SLR a few months ago and I have been overjoyed with the acquisition. And, because of it, I came to observe that people now have forgotten that there was such a thing as a viewfinder and there are even those from the younger generation who have never used a camera with a viewfinder. They simply don't understand how to use a camera and take photos using a viewfinder. This is such a shift from what it used to be before. It came naturally to people but now it has to be learnt.

I found it very amusing that recently I had to actually teach someone how to hold my SLR and how to look through the viewfinder. It was not their inability that was amusing but the fact that just a few years ago I was teaching someone to use my point-and-shoot digital camera and look through the screen!