We’re all familiar with the stereotyped image of the old-school movie director. Clad in jodhpurs, a monocle and a French beret, he would spot a possible scene and frame it in his fingers, or lift a fancy viewfinder to his face. Well guess what? Now there’s an app for that.
Viewfinder (and the more expensive Viewfinder Pro) both do the same thing (Pro adds larger formats to the mix). They turn you iPhone into a camera viewfinder. The picture comes from the iPhone’s own camera and is displayed on screen with a number of outlines. These squares and rectangles correspond to the area that would be snapped by a particular camera and lens combo.
You set up a range of on-screen shortcut buttons for your various cameras using the menus (almost every camera is in there, and you can specify the specs manually if it isn’t). From there, you pick a range of focal lengths (And aspect ratios for cameras which support several) and the appropriate bright-lines will be overlaid on the picture, allowing you to see, all together, the various shots you would get with different lenses. Anyone who has used a Leica rangefinder camera will be instantly familiar with the multi-box approach.
It’s not just lines on a screen, either. You can choose to darken the areas outside of a chosen frame to remove distraction, much like the Photoshop crop-tool. You can even use a digital zoom to fill the screen with this view, although it gets a little fuzzy. If you want to go wider than the iPhone’s roughly 35mm field of view, you can use an optical wide-angle adapter of your choice and then dial in the focal-length multiplier. Viewfinder will then change its views for you.
Why bother, when you could just hold your camera up to your eye? First, you can see what another lens could do without actually changing it. Second, this seems to me like a great way to train yourself to see. With some practice using this app, you’ll soon have an eye for which lens will give you the picture you want. You can even grab a shot which includes the lines for later use.
Viewfinder costs $8, way less than any hardware solution, and also more likely to be in your pocket when you need it. The Pro version, which as we said just adds larger format cameras, costs a money-grabbing $15. Both available now.
Viewfinder Standard [iTunes via Luminous Landscape]
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