Looking Down On Life - An Adams & Co Viewfinder

Another day, another Viewfinder to look into. A particularly nice one at that, proper solid Brass with no less than three glass lenses, and a bona fide antique as far as I can tell. They certainly knew how to build these things back then, though I have to say this was clearly not built for a 35mm compact camera.

How do I know this? Well, Adams & Co, the London company that made these patented viewfinders, doesn’t seem to have survived as a significant manufacturing company into the era of compact cameras. Their forte was building high-end Plate Cameras in the early days of photography, which is presumably what this Viewfinder was designed for. The big giveaway though is the mounting ‘foot’ which is clearly not designed to fit a standard cold shoe, and one of the reasons I decided on the risky move of disassembling my example. Another reason is that I like disassembling things, and maybe the optics would benefit from a bit of a clean and polish.

As it was, all three of the Viewfinder’s glass optics were fine, even the 100+ year old mirror was merely showing its age in that rather attractive way old mirrors do, perfectly useable with just a few spots where the mirroring has perished over the years. Needless to say the brass case is missing one of its teeny-tiny screws, a screw I'll probably never find a replacement for. Why do these things always have a screw missing?

So all that really needed doing was some serious adjustment to the steel foot so it would sit comfortably into a Cold Shoe, ideally somewhat proud of the camera’s body so it wouldn’t interfere with the Shutter Dial. I’d like to say this was a precision job, fully respecting the age of a delicate antique instrument. In truth it was a 'bend-and-hope' job with a pair of old pliers, because the even tinier screws holding the steel strip to the bottom of the brass casing couldn’t be shifted so I had to do it in situ, not ideal!

Mission accomplished though, albeit that the whole thing rocks a little on the cold shoe so needs a little finessing yet. The image is satisfyingly bright and clear and gives approximately the same 50mm view as the FED’s own viewer. It also looks OK on the camera.

Best of all though, those technical wizards at Adams & Co designed their Viewfinder with a mask that can be rotated to show the field of view in Portrait (left), or more handily from the perspective of my cameras, Landscape (below). It's a bit stiff but it works, and means that unlike my other Waist Level Viewer, I shouldn't have to add my own framing lines to a lens