Why I Made Forma

Why I Made Forma

Forma came out of a frustration I kept running into over and over again: I wanted a fast, accurate way to see a composition before fully committing to the camera.

I shoot a lot of different formats and a lot of different kinds of cameras, from 35mm and medium format to 4×5, 5×7, 8×10 and panoramic formats. Some are simple to carry around and some definitely are not. What they all have in common, though, is that the process of finding the photograph and the process of operating the camera are often tied together more than they need to be.

I wanted to separate those two things.

The problem is especially obvious with large format. If I’m out shooting 8×10, I don’t want to carry the camera from spot to spot, set up the tripod, mount the camera, choose a lens, open it up, get under the dark cloth and look at the ground glass just to decide that I should really be ten feet to the left. Then I have to move everything and start again. If I’m working in fading light, or the scene is changing, that entire process becomes even more frustrating.

But the idea isn’t really limited to large format. Even with a small camera, there are times when I don’t want to search for a photograph by repeatedly bringing the camera to my eye, changing lenses, or looking at a screen. Sometimes I just want to walk around, look at the scene, quickly compare possibilities and decide where the photograph is before the camera becomes part of the process.

That was the basic idea behind Forma: a dedicated tool for looking.

I’ve owned and used a number of external viewfinders over the years, and many of them are beautiful pieces of equipment. Traditional optical finders can be genuinely useful, especially when they’re well matched to a particular camera and lens. But they also tend to put another optical system between you and the scene. You’re looking through layers of glass that can introduce distortion, reduce brightness, change contrast, or simply make the world feel a little more removed than it really is.

I wanted something different.

I wanted to look directly at the scene itself, not at an optical interpretation of it. I didn’t want another little window that distorted or dimmed what I was actually looking at. I wanted the scene itself to remain as open and natural as possible, with only the frame added.

That became one of the central ideas behind Forma.

Rather than trying to recreate what the taking lens sees through another optical system, Forma gives you the framelines while allowing you to look directly at the real scene around them. There’s no tunnel-like view and no miniature image being presented to you through layers of glass. You’re simply looking at the world with a frame imposed over it.

That changes the experience more than I expected. I can keep both eyes open, see what is happening outside the composition, move around freely and quickly explore how the frame changes as I change my position. It feels less like looking into another camera and more like looking at the photograph I’m trying to make.

It becomes less about operating equipment and more about finding the photograph.

There was another problem I wanted Forma to solve: traditional external finders were usually tied to a particular camera, format or set of focal lengths. If you change systems, the finder becomes useless, or you end up needing several different finders to cover different cameras and lenses.

That never made much sense to me.

I wanted one viewfinder that could move between whatever I happened to be shooting.

The solution was to make the frame itself interchangeable.

Forma uses removable frameline cards, so the body of the viewfinder stays the same while the cards determine what you’re seeing. A card can represent a focal length on 4×5, 8×10, 6×17, 6×6, 35mm, digital, cinema, or essentially any other format. It can also show unusual crops or combinations that would never exist in a conventional optical finder.

That flexibility is probably the biggest reason Forma exists. I don’t want my viewfinder to dictate what camera I use. I want it to adapt to the camera and lens I already want to shoot.

That also led to one of my favourite uses for Forma: comparing focal lengths.

A lot of the time, I’m not trying to decide between wildly different lenses. I might be shooting 8×10 and wondering whether the composition works better with a 235mm or a 300mm, or shooting 4×5 and deciding between a 135mm and a 180mm. Those decisions are often close enough that they can be difficult to visualize accurately without actually mounting the lenses and looking through the camera.

Forma lets me put multiple focal lengths on a single card and compare them instantly.

That becomes especially useful when the light is disappearing. Choosing a lens can take minutes, and in those few minutes the entire scene can change. Sometimes photographers simply make a choice and hope it was the right one because losing the light is worse than choosing the wrong lens. I wanted a way to make that decision before I touched the camera.

With Forma, I can walk into a scene, raise the finder, compare two or three focal lengths, decide where I want to stand and know which lens I want to use. By the time I start setting up the camera, most of the compositional decisions have already been made.

I also wanted Forma to work equally well around my neck or mounted on the camera itself.

For some types of photography, especially large format and landscape work, I prefer to use it as a scouting tool. I can walk around with very little in my hands, find the composition, decide on the lens and only then bring the camera into position.

For other cameras, mounting Forma directly to a hot shoe makes more sense. The same basic idea still applies: a clean, open view with framelines designed specifically for whatever lens and format I’m using.

That distinction is important to me because I don’t really think of Forma as a camera accessory in the traditional sense. It’s a tool for finding photographs.

The name “Forma” came from that idea too. Before the camera, the film, the exposure or any of the technical decisions involved in making an image, there is the shape of the photograph itself. Where the edges are, where the subject sits, what gets included, what gets left out and how everything inside the frame relates to everything else.

That is where the photograph begins.

I originally built Forma because I wanted this tool for myself: one viewfinder that could move between the ridiculous variety of cameras and lenses I like to use, something simple enough to keep around my neck, accurate enough to trust, and flexible enough that I wouldn’t have to replace it every time I changed formats.

The more I used it, the more obvious it became that the idea wasn’t specific to the way I shoot.

It was simply a different way of approaching the viewfinder.

Find the photograph first.

Then make it.

Peter