This Is Why You Need A Viewfinder

Man in Beetlejuice costume in New Year's Day Parade in London

Man in Beetlejuice costume in New Year’s Day Parade in London.

I used a Ricoh GR III and I held the camera out in front of me at upper chest height and smiled at him and he smiled at me. But the photo shows him looking at a point higher than the lens of the camera, as of course it would because he was looking at my face.

Had he been a model and we were on a photoshoot I would have told him to look into the lens. Or had I looked at him and held the camera at eye height and shot him from there I would maybe have caught him looking right at me. But I doubt it. Basically the camera is tiny, and I doubt he would have known where to look. And with its 28mm full frame equivalent lens is too wide to work with for portraits, at least for me.

Of course many people seize up when a lens is pointed at them and the photographer is looking at them through a viewfinder. The idea setup would be an invisible camera.

Here is the full frame of the shot.