Originally Posted By: tfabris
Originally Posted By: canuckInOR
Why do you have to make the camera part of your head?


Because at that point, your head becomes the "third leg" of the tripod of stability points holding the camera steady.

Yes, that's a benefit. But making the camera part of your head isn't the only way to make a camera steady. I've used beanbags, rocks, walls, trees, tripods, camera bags, rolled up clothing, my head, my knees (while sitting), my kayak (although, since I was in a micro-eddy at the time, the kayak was moving quite a bit and it didn't really help much :)), along with a variety of other things.

Quote:
Until I read this thread, I didn't understand why it was so important to have a viewfinder for truly professional high quality photography. Now I see why it's so important. When you're talking about detail levels in a photograph that will stand up to serious scrutiny, and you're in a situation where a physical tripod isn't an option, then it's your only choice for a truly stable shooting platform.

It's not. Reducing undesired motion blur with a stable shooting platform, yes. The viewfinder as a method of composing your shot? Not so much. That it helps do the former in some instances is a positive side-effect.

The reason the viewfinder on an SLR is excellent for composing a shot is because it shows you exactly what you're going to capture on film. That's really important. In the past, non-SLR analog cameras (particularly at the consumer level) had their little viewfinder approximation -- essentially a hole in the camera body. Without a lot of practice so you knew how to compensate, there was always a little slop -- you could never compose exactly what you wanted. Now, with digital camera LCDs displaying exactly what the camera will capture, they've gotten rid of the hole-in-the-body viewfinder, because the point of a viewfinder is to... compose your shot, and it's a pointless, inaccurate redundancy. Having an SLR/mirror/prism is no longer a necessity to composing shots accurately -- what you see on the LCD is what your camera will capture.

So again, what's the difference between watching an image slide around in a viewfinder, and watching an image slide around on an LCD? Mirror vs mirrorless?

What happens if you have an LCD hood/loupe on your camera? My dad uses one to cut down the glare off the LCD in bright Texas sunlight, when he's out in the field. Still mirrorless...