Scanning Around With Gene: How to Look Like a Real Photographer

Gene Gable

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Originally published August 6, 2008

When I was in high school I spent a great deal of time hiding behind a 35mm Nikkormat camera under the guise of taking pictures for the yearbook. I noticed pretty early that kids with cameras around their necks were less likely to get beaten up, and there was a certain anonymity that comes from continually obscuring your face. Not a bad thing for a 16-year-old.

Of course those were the days before digital technology added screens to the backs of cameras. If you wanted to compose a shot, you had no choice but to hold the camera up to your eye and look through the viewfinder. When I was sans camera, someone would occasionally joke about not recognizing me without that “attachment” to my face.

So it brought back both fond memories and a certain longing when I came across a small box of camera instruction manuals last week at a garage sale. Nearly all of these images are from Japanese camera companies and range from about 1965 to 1980.

Back then, most 35mm cameras came from Japan, where the hobby of photography as well as the manufacturing of camera gear was going through an incredible boom. Very good lenses and cameras also came from Germany and Switzerland, but these were out of reach financially for a high-school kid.

It’s difficult to imagine that people needed instruction on how to look through a camera, but even the most sophisticated camera manuals had these images of how to hold a camera to your eye. Many of them also had lengthy printed descriptions to accompany the pictures, advising photographers not to place fingers in front of lenses, flashes, and meters.

I suppose some of this advice was necessary. There were no previews back then and you actually had to wait until the film was developed to see the images. It was not that unusual to have the prints come back with blurry black blobs (that looked suspiciously like a finger) obscuring the images.

Nearly all these manuals show the camera being held either vertically or horizontally. I only found this one image showing the camera being held upside down.

Even though most of today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras also have viewfinders, you don’t see many people looking through them. Instead, people awkwardly hold the camera at arms’ length in front of their face, moving it back and forth to “zoom in and out,” all the while acting like someone who left their reading glasses at home and can’t quite focus on a small book.

I’m glad I learned how to take pictures back in the day when all you had to worry about was how to look through the viewfinder and focus. I can’t imagine what sort of instructions came with this model, from Minolta, called the Talker. From the looks of the picture, I imagine even the Japanese were somewhat speechless about a camera that you could carry on a conversation with. But why, I wonder, did you not hold it up to your ear?