Last week I had the opportunity to use an anamorphic adapter to do some street photography during my lunch hour. This is really using movie equipment; overpowered but when you have access to it, you want to play with the toys. And so I did.

I said in my last post that I really love motion pictures and especially the extreme wide aspect of classics like the David Lean pictures, the Sergio Leone westerns. The widescreen technology in film was developed to make the theatre experience more than people could get on their early televisions. For my stills, I and every other photographer, am trying to find something that helps distinguish our work from others. So when I have a chance to try a new technology, just like they did with motion pictures, I'm going to jam it on my camera.

The shots you see here are shot through a Panasonic LA7200 16:9 lens mounted on top of a Nikkor 35mm mounted on my Canon 7D.

The Panasonic is an anamorphic lens. It's a curved lens that takes in an image that is wider than it is high. Picture a fisheye lens but oval instead of round. It also has a massive hood that makes it instantly a very macho lens to hold. This adapter is screwed onto a 35mm prime. You would get a wider image by putting it on a wider lens but at some point you probably will get vignetting or it would be too wide a composition.

The object here is not to just get a wide angle shot but also to get one that has a widescreen aspect. The 16:9 aspect ratio is the most common screen area for modern televisions and computer monitors. There is just something very pleasing about the widescreen composition for me (and something I've never understood about a square picture). You can still have a dominant foreground subject and at the same time have something of interest in the background and even more environment behind it. You can still compose using the rule of thirds for sure.

More than that, in the future I want to replicate my love of movie cinematographer composition with all that widescreen space. The shot of my workmate Alen above is close to a classic thirds shot in film. In a movie scene you may also be able to include the main character's supporting players to the left of him, or say a background event. In a western you could have men on horses approaching, a train pulling out. In a war film, such as the superb "City of Life and Death" I saw last night, you could have buildings toppling and tanks rolling while at the same time devoting large screen space to the features of the main character as he reacts to the events in front of him.

And wide screen just gives you more space to fill the image with a subject that has a lot of length, of course.

Shooting with it was pretty fun. I expected that the large hood would garner a lot of interruptions and comments but surprisingly people did not register as I was shooting candids. Only had a couple people ask me about it while in the lunch time traffic people were just concerned with their own lives and didn't care that yet another camera was being pointed vaguely in their direction.

On the other hand, the fact that the image came compressed (squished vertically) in my 3:2 viewfinder did make it somewhat difficult to compose. My friend who lent me the adapter also offered the convertion viewfinder that would give me the 16:9 image in my viewfinder but it would have made the whole system even bulkier. I would probably have walked into people and fallen over benches.

After capturing, you have to stretch the image. My Canon 7D records still information in 3:2 so in Photoshop I had to stretch it to back to the 16:9. At first I just multiplied the image by its scale factor but it was pointed out to me that I could keep the same 16:9 ratio but reduce it to a simpler ratio so that I didn't have to interpolate such a huge image. Before Photoshop would refuse to save a PSD (which I had to create for sharpen layers). By multiplying the width to 1.3 you will get the same ratio.

There is still distortion with this lens. You can see that anything near the edges is still more narrow than it should be and also there is pincushioning when shooting straight horizontal lines. Hopefully, I will learn some more how best to shoot and process with this combination.