Overcoming “No Viewfinder” Concerns

I can still remember buying my first camera, a Nikkormat, back in 1974. Since then every camera I ever owned had a viewfinder of some sort built into it. The prospect of ever owning a camera that didn’t have a viewfinder was so foreign to me that I simply dismissed buying the Nikon 1 J5 out-of-hand. Well, the combination of the delay in an updated V-Series body and the lure of improved image quality of the J5’s 20.8MP BSI sensor finally got to me and I bought one a little over a month ago. Within a week of buying the first one, I bought a second J5. What I discovered was that overcoming my ‘no viewfinder’ concerns was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks since my last posting on Photography Life, which has resulted in a number of articles on my blog. I thought I’d share an eclectic mix of images from those postings with Photography Life readers to help demonstrate why the majority of my ‘no viewfinder’ concerns were unfounded.

NIKON 1 J5 + 6.7-13mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 10.2mm, ISO 160, 1/1250, f/5.6

One of the biggest concerns I had when buying the Nikon 1 J5 was capturing landscape images on bright, sunny days. I really wondered how difficult glare on the back of the camera would make achieving the framing I wanted in my photographs. Especially having to deal with it on an ongoing basis rather than for just a couple of weeks when doing field work to write a camera review.