So you got a brand new Point and Shoot, or a DSLR or even an SLR with a 3″ ultra bright, ultra high density LED screen. The objects looks very sharp and crisp on the LCD screen and there is no way you are making mistakes while manually focusing on your subject. How about going for a day’s trip and shooting pictures out in the open? Well, unless you live too high up in the North, chances are that you do get sunlight and a bright day can surely provide enough light for the subject of the picture, but at the same time the sunlight would render your LCD useless. Then you’d be moving around here and there, hand-shading your camera’s LCD and what not! The solution is to buy a LCD finder, which are possibly pretty expensive! Frugals have already found their way out of this problem and you don’t need to spend more than $5 if you can do some work and can live with a non-branded, no-showoff piece attached to your camera.

Things that you are going to need to make a LCD viewfinder

1. A plastic bottle with rectangular base. Base dimensions should be the size of your screen. Something like a baby powder container would probably do.
2. A plastic lens – little larger than the front circular opening of the bottle.
3. Good quality rubberbands
4. Headphone earbuds
5. Hot glue
6. Black plastic paint

A quick lesson to assemble everything (there’s a video below, in case you don’t wish to read through the tutorial)

1. Cut the base of the bottle and finish it so that the base fits the camera’s LCD properly
2. Paint the inside and outside of the bottle with black plastic paint. We do this to insulate the setup so that no light enters through the walls of the bottle
3. Stick the plastic lens with hot glue to the circular opening of the bottle. Make sure you do it from the inside
4. Cut a small circular hole in the headphone earbud and cover the circular top with the earbud. This makes the eye-piece of the viewfinder
5. Now use the rubberband to fix the viewfinder from the top and the bottom to the camera

That’s it, you are ready to take pictures in sheer sunlight without any hassle of viewing the LCD.
Here’s a quick video posted by Knoptop:-