Gabriel’s Beanz

It remained rather damp and overcast today; I had a long stretch at work with a late finish, and did not escape till nearly 7pm. That said, it wasn’t a bad day by any means—just a case of applying nose to grindstone and ploughing through to the end. When I got home I remembered I still needed to get my daily photo, but fortunately this coincided with the arrival of a new toy. I’ve been expanding my little collection of Moment optics for the iPhone, and today the Anamorphic 1.55x T-series lens landed on my desk. These are very popular with videographers, allowing true cinematic wide-screen footage to be captured using the whole sensor; squishing the wide image horizontally to fit the sensor, but it can then be ‘de-squeezed’ in post-processing to recover the wide frame. Now I am not much of a videographer, stills are pretty much my thing… so why did I want this lens? 

Panoramics, that’s why. I’ve always loved a panoramic aspect ratio ; I think it lends itself to some really interesting compositions, both horizontal and vertical. For landscapes and vertical architecture shots, the scanning pano mode on modern smartphones does a very good job of stitching together a panorama on the fly—but for moving subjects it has its limitations. I have been greatly inspired by Jeff Bridges’ amazing work using the Widelux film camera, which you can see on his website here, and I think there’s a lot of scope for interesting work using a panoramic approach to portrait and street photography.