Viewfinders - Text 8
The Parvo was in addition equipped with a sports viewfinder made up of a lens attached to the front of camera and a perforated metal plate at the back.
The Quest for a Parallax-Free Viewfinder: the Bell & Howell 2709 and the Mitchell
In his memoirs, Billy Bitzer claims to have shot The Birth of a Nation (1915) with only two lenses: “The Birth was taken on the hand-cranked $300 Pathé camera with a 2.52-inch lens interchangeable and a wide-angle lens; you had to screw it out and screw the other into its place.”[4] While this might appear to reflect a Spartan approach to cinematography, two is actually twice the number of lenses used on the vast majority of early film shoots. The Bell & Howell Model 2709 camera which promptly replaced the Pathé Professionnelle in most U.S. film studios over the latter half of the 1910s was, however, equipped with a turret that could hold no fewer than four different lenses of varying focal lengths.