Measure the LCD screen on your camera; mine's about 40mm wide x 30mm high so I'm going to use that as a guide, but you can make yours any size you wish. Look on your computer for a program with which you can draw straight horizontal and vertical lines. I used PageMaker simply because I have it, but just about any graphics or word-processing program should do it; you could even use Photoshop. Using the program you've selected for the job, choose A4 for the paper size. Make sure the Rulers are activated on the computer screen, and make a box on the page 40mm x 30mm; I made the lines which make this box 2 Point line width. Now you simply add horizontal and vertical lines inside the box so it ends up looking a bit like a tiny piece of graph paper. You need enough lines to be useful but not so many as to be distracting. I suggest first placing one each horizontal and vertical line at the half-way points of your box using a 1 Point line width (in the above example this would be 20mm along the longer side and 15mm along the shorter side). As a minimum I would now divide each of those section in half again, so you end up with your box divided by three equally-spaced lines vertically, and the same horizontally, using a 0.5 Point line width. This would give you a "graph page" containing 16 small boxes. If you really wished you could divide each small box in half again using more horizontal and vertical lines. If you did this you'd have a 40mm x 30mm box containing a grid of 64 tiny boxes. Print this on to plain white A4 paper (inkjet or laser - doesn't matter), cut out the box and hold it over your camera's LCD screen to satisfy yourself it's the correct size, and that you feel the grid is appropriate, i.e. doesn't have too many or too few boxes. When you're happy with your grid, (play around with it if you wish) I suggest you "Copy and Paste" it several times on the page on your computer, leaving at least a centimetre between each copy. If your grid is around 40mm x 30mm as mine is, an A4 page will hold 18 copies easily. Up to now you've used plain white copy paper; that was just to make samples with which you could experiment. Obviously the grid you use on your camera must be transparent, so instead of plain copy paper you'll now print on to clear film, the type used for overhead projectors. This film is very common, but some can only be used in inkjet printers while others can only be used in laser printers or photocopiers. If you have the correct type for your printer, great. If you don't you'll probably find it's not worth buying a whole packet of film for just one sheet, so it may be best to copy the file from which you'll print onto CD / Zip / Floppy and take it to someone who can print it for you. Most office-supply stores and copy shops will be able to print it if it's in a commonly used program file format. If you can make an Acrobat PDF file, save it in that format as it's pretty universal. When you've printed your sheet of grids, cut one out very carefully. The screen can be attached to the camera using ordinary clear adhesive tape (you'll probably have to cut the tape to half-width). You only need the tape to cover a couple of millimetres at the sides of the screen to hold it, and about the same on the camera. Make sure you don't let any adhesive touch the surface of the LCD screen. It's obviously absolutely essential to fit the grid over the LCD "square", so take extra care when doing so or the very advantage of using a grid screen will be lost. Of course if you don't want to make your own and a 40mm x 30mm size fits your camera, you can simply download my PDF file which has an A4 sheet with 18 screens on it - nine each of two designs. Either print the PDF on your own printer if you have suitable transparency sheets, or take the PDF to a copy shop. If it's not convenient to take the PDF file on CD or something, you could just print it on to white A4 paper on your own printer and take the A4 sheet to a copy shop and they'll make a copy on transparency film. These little grid screens are very handy in many photographic situations,
and are so cheap to produce you can keep several in your gadget bag for
ready use. |
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If you'd like to download my Grid Screen file in PDF format, just CLICK
HERE. |