Anamorphic Photography


If you carefully watch a hollywood movie, you might notice some oval bokeh, big, horizontal flares- and of course the W I D E screen. These are all caused by using an Anamorphic lens during recording, also known as "Cinemascope". This was used to capture a widescreen-image onto a standard movie film format, thereby maximizing the image quality. (because the whole area was used, instead of black bars) If you know how expensive it is to record movies on film, you'll also appreciate wanting to use it all. Nowadays, they're mostly used for the distinct look they have, and, because of big movies using them, they have a "cinematic" quality that's much sought after. Historically, the cinema cameras would use a purpose-built single lens for this, whereas for projecting, a two-lens setup is fine, where the anamorphic adapter is- well- an adapter. This makes the projector capable of normal and anamorphic movies. Since analog projectors aren't widely used anymore, home users have put these projection lenses on other cameras, with great looks and slight hassle as a result. The anamorphics also need to be focussed... Anyway, enough about the history. On to the pictures.
This was my setup for these pictures- the excellent Nikon FE with a 100mm lens, and the Proskar anamorphic-16 adapter, originally built for 16mm projectors. While a bit long, it's still fairly portable and not too heavy.




In this photo, you can see a few things- the center sharpness is quite good, while edge sharpness gets progressively worse. (this gets better if stopped down) Also, that this format is indeed W I D E. None of the images in this post are cropped at all- they’re showing the full originally 3:2 negative, which has now been expanded to a crazy 6:2 (3:1) photo.




In close-ups, the distinct look that anamorphics bring becomes more noticeable. Combine this with the soft bokeh of the 100mm lens, and the overall effect is quite nice.

I’ve also darkroom-printed this photo (which requires a crazy darkroom setup) for that post, see Anamorphic Darkroom Printing







This was a long-exposure shot at a crossing, of 12 seconds. I didn’t think to bring a tripod, so I had to hold it tight against a lanternpost. Seems like that worked. The stars are from the relatively closed aperture. Also really neat: You can see that some of the vehicles used PWM controlled LED lights- if you look at the green and yellow streaks, you’ll notice they’re made up of a lot of little dots!

If you're wondering how the negatives coming out of this setup look- it's a bit of an odd look. So, to show this, I've got an unedited scan to the right.

B/W pictures shot on Agfa apx100, developed in Ilfosol3 Color pictures are on Fujifilm C200, shot at 400iso, pushed 1 stop in dev.