Why did you need to hide under a blanket like object when taking pictures using an old school camera?
In: Other
So like, on your old style point-and-shoot camera, when you composed your photo, you’d look through the viewfinder which was a separate lense than the main lense, kind of like a scope on a telescope. This has no bearing on the question at all; I’m only including it so you know that that’s NOT what I’m talking about when I talk about proper viewfinding.
So with that design above, you can get pretty close to the photo you composed but that viewfinder uses a different lense and is at a different location than the lense which exposes the film or digital sensor. It’s fine for a point-and-shoot where you can’t swap out lenses.
On fancier cameras, they have an arrangement called SLR (single lense reflex). When you look through the viewfinder on an SLR camera, you’re looking through two mirrors and then through the main camera lense. Slap a telephoto lense on there and the viewfinder is now composing a photo of something a mile a way. (This is the kind of camera where the viewfinder blanks out when you take a picture since one of the mirrors has to jump out of the way real quick.) Using the actual lense to compose a photo is the absolute ideal because the slight difference on location of a scope-style viewfinder and the main lense can cause a professional photo to be shit since what you thought you were shooting ended up being different from what you DID shoot.
So why am I going on about viewfinders? View cameras (those big accordion looking cameras) don’t have a tiny little viewfinder like an SLR. No mirror, no eyepiece. They also don’t have a secondary lense for a scope-style viewfinder.
So how do you know if the photo is composed correctly or the lense is in focus or zoomed or you backplane and front plane are aligned how you like?
The whole back of the camera is the viewfinder. There’s a 8×10 (or larger) piece of ground glass on the back right where the film would normally go. The lense on the front of the camera projects an image onto it. The two problems are: a) the image is super faint, hence the blanket to block out the light, and b) the image is rotated 180 degrees (inverted, not flipped or mirrored) which has no fix.
The camera workflow: (This is from memory when I was like 10)
1. Set up the camera. These are always on a tripod. Candid, unplanned shots are not a thing in the view camera world.
2. Select and install the lense and aperture/shutter assembly. (Most have multiple interchangeable parts for both. Modern lenses will work.)
3. Install the ground glass viewfinder and blanket.
4. Remove lense cap and set the aperture/shutter assembly to viewfinder mode (this opens the aperture/shutter all the way to fully open and leaves it there).
5. Go under the cape and compose your photo moving the camera, subjects, lense settings, lighting, etc as necessary.
6. Remove the ground glass. (On some cameras, this isn’t removed. There’s a lever which moves it away from the camera body leaving a gap.)
7. Insert the film holder and lock it in place.
8. Close the aperture/shutter and prime it if necessary.
9. Insert a film sheet into the film holder. (View cameras shoot large format film. You’re familiar with 35mm film. Some may even be familiar with 70mm large format. A common size for a view camera is 8″x10″.)
10. Slide out the film cover exposing the film inside the camera.
11. Trigger the aperture/shutter to take the photo.
12. If you’re doing a manual/long exposure, start the timer and close the aperture/shutter after the timer expires.
13. Slide the film cover back in to cover the film so it can be removed from the camera.
14. Steps 10, 11, 12, and 13 can be repeated for double/multiple exposures.
15. Remove the 8×10 from the film holder and mark a note on it as to what the photo is or that the very least that the film’s has already been used so you don’t try to use it again.
16. Take the film to Wal*Mart to get it developed. (I’m speculating on this one here since my dad used Polaroid self-developing film for his view camera rather than developing it in a darkroom. Yes, Polaroid made 8×10 self-developing film for view cameras.)
Source: My dad had a view camera and we used to mess around with it back in the early 90s. I say ‘had’ because he had it loaded in a saddlebag on his motorcycle. He hit a bump and it came out and exploded on contact with the freeway. Wasn’t antique or anything, but yeah.
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