Square format composing with a DSLR ??

[igmolinav]

Hi,

Long time ago, I had an old Hasselblad. I really enjoyed composing
with the square format.

I would really be able to compose some of my pictures with a Nikon or Canon
DSLR as if I were to be composing them with a square format camera.
Is there a way to do it or to insert something into the viewfinder??
(I don't mean after the picture has been taken and then with
photoshop or other program a square is cut out).

Thank you very much, kind regards,

igmolinav

 

[leighonigar]

You can get screens with gridlines. You could use one of these and imagination (various Nikon cameras have on-demand gridlines). Unfortunately most of these will not actually make a useful square, including the Nikon.

I was going to suggest buying another screen and masking it, as chinese focusing screens can usually be found on ebay for not that much, however, I think that if the screen was masked it would mess up most of the metering modes, except possibly spot, I don't know.

It's an interesting problem, and of course, with any of these solutions the camera is still going to record the full frame, and you're going to have to crop your images down in post processing regardless of what happens to the viewfinder. Part of me thinks you'd be best off with live-view and a black mask for the screen, if you could bring yourself to look at the screen, rather than viewfinder.

Good luck with this, essentially - I'm not aware of a product to do exactly what you want to, you really want a special camera.

The other thing that I picked up was that some of the Ricoh cameras have a square crop, the GR Digital II methinks. But these are compacts.

 

[Cliff3]

You could purchase a 3rd party focusing screen from a company like KatzEye Optics and order the screen with square crop lines.

 

[leighonigar]

I don't know how much it would cost, but they might actually be able to make a screen with just the two crop lines you would need for a central square. This would be the best option, and the most expensive, short of getting a square format medium format back.