Right angle viewfinder

  I really love to shoot from low angles, but the problem so far has been that it's quite a challenge to do it. Placing my camera on the ground and trying to see something from the viewfinder is hard. One solution is a camera with an articulating screen. The problem at least with my D5100 is that the AF don't work as well as I would like when trying to auto focus in the liveview-mode. A good solution is a right angle viewfinder. Nikon has their own, but that price..! So if you are not interested in investing 300 € in a small piece of plastic and glass you might find the Opteca Professional 1X-2.5X right angle viewfinder interesting, I got one and it works pretty well. The package comes with six different mounting attachments so you can use the same angle finder in Nikon, Canon, Samsung, Pentax etc. cameras. The down side with the attachments is that they are plastic and in my opinion not very good quality plastic. I broke mine after a couple of times out in the field, so this a thing you might want to be careful with, don't be rough with the small plastic thingies. Other vice I'm pretty satisfied with it. It's solid, and works as it should. There is a switch to change the magnification from 1X to 2.5X, but I haven't found it useful yet and besides in the 2.5X position it's pretty much impossible to see the shutter values in the viewfinder so that's one more reason why I'm not using it.

Here's a few images which can tell for what purpose I got mine...

 Groups of flowers or...

 ...just one isolated but from a very low angle.


Reptiles and amphibians are a very good low angle subject.

  Still waiting for  the first snakes to emerge from the hibernation.

The right angle finder works in pet photography too.

   Down low without any pain in the neck or awkward strange positions. I'm sure that this small piece of equipment will be in hard use.