AN INELEGANT (BUT NOT COMPLETELY TACKY) SOLUTION TO AN OLD, VEXING PROBLEM
Last winter I planned to take pictures of a local nighttime festival and parade with my M10 and 21mm lens. I slipped an external 21mm viewfinder into the accessory shoe and off I went, only to discover that in walking from my car to the event I had lost my viewfinder! Very luckily, I found it the next day in the light. I had not been so lucky in the past. Back when we were using film Leicas, the dropped or lost viewfinder (or other shoe-fit accessory) was an old, sad story. Perhaps today with Live View, people use these viewfinders less, but I don’t.
Through the years, I had spoken at length with such people as Tom Abrahamsson, Don Goldberg, and Stefan Daniel about possible solutions to this, all to no avail. My best idea was to have some sort of swing-up thingy mounted just behind the accessory shoe, to lock the accessory in place. This would entail drilling a mounting hole in the back of the top plate, which thought made all of these fine gents shudder. Suggested to me was simply to put tape in the shoe, so things fit tightly, which is what I had been doing already, and which did not prevent what happened last winter.
Then, in a parking lot last summer I spied on the ground one of those black cloth-covered elastic rings that women use to secure their pony tails. I think they are called scrunchies. I know it is almost tacky, but suddenly I had a solution! I washed off and dried the scrunchie and found it fit quite well around the back of the viewfinder and then under the lens.
Why do I say this is “not completely tacky”? Completely tacky would be one of the thick purple rubber bands from the supermarket that hold stalks of broccoli, although this would work in a pinch. At least the cloth-covered scrunchie is less likely to degrade quickly and snap. And for $3.99 one can buy a pack of 18 of them! And they come in many colors to match the photographer’s camera or mood. Apparently, some hotels in Japan supply them to customers as well!
Tuulikki Abrahamsson told me that at various hotels in Japan, along with soap and shampoo, they supply high-end hair rings, with typical wacky Japanese labeling, as here: “A curious enquiring mind Makes the future bright”. Photo courtesy of Tuulikki.