Why Oscar winner Jeff Bridges loves his “moody” panoramic camera

As part of a media tour for the second season of FX's The old manJeff Bridges appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the two talk at length about Bridges' love for the Widelux panoramic film camera that his wife gave him as a wedding present.

The Widelux is a relatively rare and expensive camera that shoots panoramic images on 35mm or 120mm film (Bridges seems to prefer the 35mm option). It was made by the Japanese company Panon Camera Shoko and came onto the market in 1958. It uses a novel 26mm swivel lens with a slit that swivels and acts as a shutter, slowly exposing an area onto a strip of film. It has a field of view of 126 degrees with an image size of 24 x 59mm. Because it is a panoramic camera, the negatives it produces are twice the width of the standard 35mm frame width. It has a limited number of shutter speed options – 1/15, 1/125 and 1/250 – and fixed aperture values ​​of 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8 and 11.

Although it does have a viewfinder, it is described as “virtually useless” as it is better to compose the shot through the photographer's field of view and use the arrows on the top of the camera as a basic guide.

Bridges' love for the Widelux is no secret – it's not even the first time he's talked about it on a late-night talk show: he discussed it with Jimmy Kimmel four years ago.

“I take most of my photos with a Widelux camera. It's a swivel camera. I use the 35mm version. It has a 28mm lens that swivels almost 180 degrees. Instead of a conventional shutter, it has a slot that exposes the film as the lens swivels,” Bridges writes on his website.

“The first time I encountered such a camera was in high school. We had gathered to take our class photo. The photographer had a Widelux. He explained how it worked. Some kids thought that if they ran very fast, they could outrun the panning lens and be in the picture twice. They were right. Years later, I began using this technique to photograph actors creating the theatrical masks for tragedy and comedy. The result was someone frowning and smiling at themselves – all on one negative.”

It is this style of photography that Bridges wanted to recreate with Colbert. The Late Show this week. There are several examples of these portraits on Bridges' website, in both the volume one and volume two galleries.

“The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder is not accurate and there is no manual focus, so there is something arbitrary about it, a capricious quality. I like that. That is something I strive for in all my work – a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to accept what is there in the moment and let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist,” he continues.

“When my wife Sue, who was a professional photographer at the time, saw how much I enjoyed the photos, she gave me a Wide-Lux as a belated wedding present. I started carrying it around as a snapshot camera, taking photos of family and friends. When I was shooting a film, I sometimes took photos there too. The Wide-Lux frame is very similar to the 1:8:5 ratio of typical film. Because of its swivel lens, it acts as a kind of bridge between still photography and moving images.”