Why Oscar-Winning Actor Jeff Bridges Loves His ‘Fickle’ Panoramic Camera

As a part of a media tour for the second season of FX’s The Previous Man, Jeff Bridges appeared on The Late Present with Stephen Colbert and the 2 speak at size about Bridges’ love for the Widelux panoramic movie digicam, which he acquired as a marriage reward from his spouse.

The Widelux is a comparatively uncommon and costly digicam that captures panoramic pictures on both 35mm or 120 format movie (Bridges appears to choose the 35mm choice). It was manufactured by the Japanese firm Panon Digital camera Shoko and debuted in 1958. It makes use of a novel 26mm swing lens with a slit that pivots and acts because the shutter, slowly exposing an space onto a strip of movie because it does so. It has a 126-degree subject of view with a picture measurement of 24x59mm. As a result of it’s panoramic, the negatives it produces are twice the usual 35mm body width. It has a restricted variety of shutter velocity choices — 1/15, 1/125, and 1/250 — and set aperture values of two.8, 4, 5.6, 8, and 11.

Whereas it encompasses a viewfinder, it’s been described as “just about ineffective” as it’s higher to compose a shot by way of the photographer’s visual view and use the arrows on the highest of the digicam as primary guides.

Bridges’ love for the Widelux isn’t a secret — this isn’t even the primary time he’s talked about it on a late-night speak present: he mentioned it with Jimmy Kimmel 4 years in the past.

“Many of the images I take are carried out with a Widelux digicam. It’s a panning, nonetheless digicam. I exploit the 35mm model. It’s bought a 28mm lens that pans almost 180 levels. As a substitute of a standard shutter, it has a slit that, because the lens pans, exposes the movie,” Bridges writes on his web site.

“The primary time I got here throughout one was in highschool. We had been gathered collectively to take our class photograph. The photographer had a Widelux. He defined the way it labored. Some children figured in the event that they ran in a short time, they may beat the panning lens and be within the image twice. They have been proper. Years later, I began utilizing this method to take footage of actors creating the theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy. The consequence was somebody frowning and smiling at himself — all on one unfavorable.”

It’s that model of photograph that Bridges selected to recreate with Colbert on The Late Present this week. There are a number of examples of those portraits on Bridges’ web site, each within the quantity one and quantity two galleries.

“The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t correct, and there’s no guide focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious high quality. I like that. It’s one thing I aspire to in all my work — a scarcity of preciousness that makes issues extra human and trustworthy, a willingness to obtain what’s there within the second, and to let go of the consequence. Getting out of the way in which appears to be one of many important duties for me as an artist,” he continues.

“When my spouse, Sue, who was taking footage professionally on the time, noticed how a lot I loved the images, she gave me a Extensive-Lux as a belated marriage ceremony reward. I began carrying it round as a snap shot digicam, taking footage of household and mates. Once I was making a film, I typically took footage there, too. The Extensive-Lux body is so much just like the 1:8:5 ratio of a typical film. Due to its panning lens, it features as form of a bridge between nonetheless pictures and transferring footage.”