I started down a rabbit hole two days ago when I saw a local craigslist ad that had a cheap 35mm pocket camera that had once been given away in magazines. I forgot the name but it basically cropped the 35mm frame so that it looked like it was a widescreen movie frame.

I love ultra-pano framed movies whether they were done anamorphically or cropped that way. Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Sergio Leone's films. All make great use of wide aspect. It isn't so much that it is wide as the aspect gives you a frame that makes you look two ways when you are looking at a composition. This is the very opposite of square formats that I've never really understood.

On anamorphic lenses

Since failing to buy that camera I started reading up on anamorphic lenses. Anamorphic lenses are non-circular lenses that only give you wide aspect information. They are curved lenses that give you squished images into the camera. Then it is up to you to reform them in post to recreate the wide information with everything in its proper width and height.

These are extremely expensive. They don't make enough of them and most people in the video and film business just crop them (though losing information in the tops and bottoms) and also requiring that you mask off your viewfinder so that you can can frame correctly.

Coincidentally, my friend Dylan who has a business renting video gear primarily to DSLR-movie people, said that he had just acquired just such a lens, or rather, an adapter that goes on top of a regular lens to feed it the anamorphic image.

This is what I'm carrying around all today and some of tomorrow. I'll be shooting street with this very odd lens with its massive hood and hopefully getting some good results.

More on this later, hopefully with some funky pics.