Here are some examples of the still photography I’ve been doing around town with my Nikon and ISCO Anamorphic lens combo. (Thanks to the friends who have used it for my pictures too!) It’s definitely for slow paced non mission critical shoots, but I’ve always loved the 2.39:1 aspect ratio of my favorite movies. I got the lens back at the beginning of Fall here in Georgia, which is always a pretty time of year. More images to be added in this rolling post. Thanks for looking!
Technical Notes: an anamorphic lens is how the movie industry shoots wide without resorting to the distorting normal spherical lenses that we all know and are used to. It’s different than simply cropping off the top and bottom of a wide angle image (from say a ~28mm iPhone), as an anamorphic keeps the subject to background compression, but with the extra space on the left and right of a shorter focal length. For all of these photos I’m using an 85mm or a 105mm. So for the 105mm it’s like getting a 50mm FOV with the telephoto look. The horizontal light streaks (though not so much on this ISCO) and oval out of focus highlights also add to that unique and “cinematic” way of rendering reality.
All these images I’ve edited in Nikon Capture NX2 (yes Nikon or someone, please bring it back…) and Photoshop. It’s hard to initially use this quirky setup, but I’ve always enjoyed editing to get the most out of Nikon RAW files. More to come!