I may have mentioned this before but actor Jeff Bridges is quite a photographer. I guess when a lot of what you do in movie acting is sitting around between takes at least Bridges fills his time creatively. For his recent role in the hit Iron Man as Obadiah Stane, Bridges spent much of the time documenting the behind-the-scenes process using a wide angle Widelux panoramic camera that takes beautiful.. wiiiiide .. shots. Perfect when you consider the size of stages, rooms full of people in story meetings, it is really an interesting perspective. He's now assembled it into an online gallery.

A Widelux camera takes 35mm film but then uses a swinging lens to scan a panorama and expose a much larger surface of a 35mm negative. The result is a super wide, but distorted, image on the negative. The view roughly corresponds to 180 degrees of vision. They are expensive with eBay prices going upwards to $2500 depending on model and obviously not something you would pick up on a whim given what it does.

Widelux' competitors -- such as the Noblex and the Horizon -- range from even more expensive or intriguingly cheap but still occupy an interesting but very restrictive niche.

Links:

• Jeff Bridges' Ironman Book
• Widelux.net
• Jeff Bridges' tips on using the Widelux
• Widelux on Flickr