I hadn’t used any camera with a viewfinder since I got my GR III in 2019. However, before going to an event one day, I started thinking: what if the batteries for my GR III don’t last long enough? What could I shoot with then? My iPhone mini probably wouldn’t have enough battery life at that time either.
So, I decided to bring along a Nikon DSLR that my cousin had given me. It’s about three to four times the size of my GR III, but its battery life is much longer.
What’s funny is that even though I carried the Nikon camera with me, I completely forgot about it because I was using my GR III the whole time — until all three of its batteries died.
When that happened, I took out the Nikon camera and started shooting. What I realized was that with a viewfinder, I always wanted my subject to be perfectly in focus before I clicked the shutter. But with my GR III, I didn’t care as much; I just clicked away.
I discovered that the viewfinder actually took too much of my attention away from the act of making photos.
To give you an example, with my GR III, which doesn’t have a viewfinder, I can shoot about 40-50 photos in one minute. But with the Nikon DSLR and its viewfinder, I could only shoot 20-30 photos or fewer because I had to manually focus on what I saw in the viewfinder.
That’s not what I want when shooting street photography, so I’ve found that a viewfinder isn’t ideal for this type of work.