From my first SLR (a 1960s Nikon F1) I experience using an SLR as actually through the lens – I don’t experience it as looking at a picture on a ground glass. I experiece it as looking at “the thing itself” (to borrow a phrase from Edward Weston, even if to use it in a different sense) just as I do through my corrective glasses. Perhaps this stems from lifting the SLR to my eye and looking through it as one does with a telescope or binoculars.

In the same breath I note that I have always preferred that the ground glass in an SLR not have a range-finder-like split image or micro-prism focuser – because it distracts from that experience of “looking directly through the lens.”

The history of the camera, and how the SLR came to be the way it is today….