Anamorphic stroke of genius

[C. D. Keth]

So I had a little lightbulb moment today. There are quite a few old cinemascope attachments for projectors around ebay. Has anyone tried one of these on a LF camera lens?

They apply a 2x squeeze to the image so in one orientation you could capture a 4x10 image on 4x5 film and in the other you could get 5x8. The same attachment could be used on an enlarger for darkroom printing or the image could very easily be unsqueezed in digital post.

What do you think? Worth pursuing?

[Gene McCluney]

I have thought of that myself years ago. I used to own theatres, so I have a few of these old anamorphic attachments. The problem is, they have terrible astigmatism at close distances. They were corrected only for the long throw of a movie image onto a screen at least 50 feet away. There is an adjustable corrector element that you can set on the front for distance, but only up to about 25 ft. So it wouldn't work on an enlarger..waay too close.

Of course the movie industry has specialty anamorphic lenses for making prints, and for shooting film, but these would not be readily available and cheap.

[Brian Vuillemenot]

So I had a little lightbulb moment today. There are quite a few old cinemascope attachments for projectors around ebay. Has anyone tried one of these on a LF camera lens?

They apply a 2x squeeze to the image so in one orientation you could capture a 4x10 image on 4x5 film and in the other you could get 5x8. The same attachment could be used on an enlarger for darkroom printing or the image could very easily be unsqueezed in digital post.

What do you think? Worth pursuing?


I'm a bit confused- why exactly do you want to do this? Is this to save film by compressing a 4X10 image into half the film area? Or perhaps it will give some sort of cool effect? Or is it simply to do something that hasn't been done before?

[C. D. Keth]

OK, so no on the enlarger, I guess. Either way, on a camera at landscape distances it should ne cool, no?

Brian: It's a bit of all of the above. Compressing 4x10 onto 4x5 film amkes good economic sense since 4x5 has such excess resolution for the print sizes I make. The artifacts of anamorphic photography are also very attractive to me.

[JW Dewdney]

hmmm... interesting. Must be something in the air! Zeitgeist? I was looking into buying some flexible first-surface optical(ish) grade mirror material for messing around with landscapes (shooting into the distorted mirror material).

[Brian C. Miller]

What about using two first-surface mirrors and shooting and enlarging at a right angle?

Wouldn't that be easier to create than grinding custom lenses?

[C. D. Keth]

What about using two first-surface mirrors and shooting and enlarging at a right angle?

Wouldn't that be easier to create than grinding custom lenses?

Who said anything about grinding lenses?:confused:

[Richard Littlewood]

I got one off E-bay. An old Ross widescreen lens made for sticking in front of a projection lens for 35mm film (I think). In my head I thought of all sorts of wacky uses for it even though it's big and heavy. Sadly after way too much messing around with it the only lens of mine it couples with to give full frame is a 135mm lens on a 35mm camera. Even then things get blurry.