Re: prism finder for the sputnik

[Paul Talbot <ptww@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lme Kbee wrote:
 
> I wanted to ask if anyone has succesfully added a
> prism finder to the Sputnik?  If so, how easy was it
> to do, how well does it work, and what is the exact
> name of the prism finder I would want to get.  I don't
> care if it has a meter in it or not.

I know what a prism is, and I know what a finder is,
but I'm not enough of a camera technical type to know
exactly what a "prism finder" is.

However, I've been meaning to post here that Don Lopp
told me at Green Bay about making a viewfinder for his
Sputnik.  I'm not very good at conjuring up mental images,
so he sent me one to look at.  (It would have been useless
for me to mention it before seeing one!)  He mounted a
viewfinder on a piece of wood that slides over the closed
finder of the Sputnik.  There are a lot of horizontal and
vertical framing lines in the viewfinder, but I haven't
figured out what all of them are for.  There is also a
center circle.  Don says he has a lot of viewfinders, and
he is a viewfinder fanatic.  It sounded like he makes a
viewfinder for all his cameras.

A disadvantage of this approach with the Sputnik is that
if you are shooting on a tripod you have to stoop down
low to look through the finder, instead of looking down
onto the built-in ground glass.  OTOH, it lets you hold
the camera up to your eye and shoot as with a traditional
35mm camera (not recommended, but if that's what you want
to do...!)  I don't know how or if Don got the marks on
the finder to align with the actual image that will be
recorded on film (but I presume that was his goal in the
first place).

Don has such an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience,
it sure would be wonderful to get him on the list somehow.  A
relative gave him a computer that was supposedly set up for
e-mail but he can't get it to work.  (I can't tell whether
it's a machine problem or a user problem.)  Of course the
next obstacle is he doesn't know how to type.  :-(  But he
*is* interested in joining us on-line.

Paul Talbot