SLR Cameras for Dummies

SLR viewfinder system

In the bad old days of content farms, a number of "freelancers" subscribed to lists of the most popular searches, lists that they used to guide their publishing at free-for-all sites like Squidoo or HubPages (some sites, like Helium and eHow, scraped search queries and offered "titles" to their contributors). Catalogs.com, the former WhoWhatWhenWhereWhy.com, seems to have been a free-for-all, which allowed people like George Garza to pound out rubbish like, "What is an SLR camera" (George's byline has been stripped off recently, but it's his, all right.).

We note with some amusement that Garza's "definition" of an SLR includes a line (left) strikingly similar to the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article about SLRs (right).

"This permits the photographer to see exactly what will be captured by the film or digital imaging system. In contrast to non-SLR cameras where the view through the viewfinder could be significantly different from what was captured on film..."

"With twin lens reflex and rangefinder cameras, the viewed image could be significantly different from the final image."

We like that repetition of "significantly different," ourselves. But, then, we have people on staff who've used SLRs... we doubt that George ever had, based on his apparent unfamiliarity with the camera. For instance, George claimed that,

"When you use an SLR camera, you will notice a big difference in your photographs..."

Maybe, maybe not: it depends on what you were using before. George also claimed that,

"SLR cameras use a pentaprism. This is a five-sided prism used to alter a beam of light by 90 degrees. "

While he's right that an SLR uses a pentaprism, George is confused about what the prism does: it actually inverts the image coming through the lens in both the horizontal and vertical planes so that you see the image in front of you. In reality, the image captured by the film is upside-down, but you never know...

George's problem here is that he knows squat about cameras: he natters a lot about point-and-shoot cameras, which also display the image in the correct orientation, but typically have a "border" in the viewfinder to demarcate the area of the view that will be captured. He apparently knows nothing about large-format twin-lens reflex cameras, whose viewfinders capture the image perfectly but display it upside down. Duh.

Garza's final disservice is to tell his readers that,

"A camera body can be replaced, but your old lenses will continue to work,"

which is not necessarily true: lenses for older film bodies do not generally work on newer digital SLR bodies. It's a shame that our Dumbass of the Day did not know that!

SE - PHOTOGRAPHY