I started down a rabbit hole two days ago when I saw a local craigslist ad that had a cheap 35mm pocket camera that had once been given away in magazines. I forgot the name but it basically cropped the 35mm frame so that it looked like it was a widescreen movie frame.

I love ultra-pano framed movies whether they were done anamorphically or cropped that way. Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Sergio Leone's films. All make great use of wide aspect. It isn't so much that it is wide as the aspect gives you a frame that makes you look two ways when you are looking at a composition. This is the very opposite of square formats that I've never really understood.

It sounds a bit like an old industrial education video but that's only because it is an oldish process. The Impossible Project have released a video showing the many steps toward making the 'film sandwich' that becomes their instant film. I'd never seen it before and it was pretty interesting the huge investment in machines needed to make it.

Check it out on Gizmodo.

This line of cameras is one of those niche items that have a group of die hard aficionados of a size you never suspected. I didn't realize people were freaks over Olympus XAs but there are groups out there and not all of them are hipsters. Me? I just collect the stuff.

All of yesterday I was developing and then scanning film with a new toy: an Epson V700 that replaces my $100 Canoscan 8400F that has served me for the past three years since I began shooting film again. The V700 cost me a pretty penny but I was growing increasingly tired of double-scanning my 4x5s and the v700's backlight area is large enough to do 4x5 in one shot. Plus, I was hoping for some increase in quality, obviously.

Videosift: Guy takes a photograph of the Stanley Cup with lens cap on

This is a mistake that can be easier to make when you have a rangefinder and having one of the most expensive ones -- a Leica M6 -- doesn't make it any harder or easier to make it.

With a rangefinder you are not looking through the image-taking lens to see if you have something in focus. You are looking through a viewfinder that is separate from the lens. So if you have something blocking the actual image-taking lens, you wouldn't know -- unless you checked ;).

The Online Photographer has named its camera of the year despite not actually having used it. I don't mean this as a criticism because, like them, I'm just giddy thinking about this piece of gear too. It's the Pentax 645D. It's just nice that in this era of massive digital cameras that .. there's one more but in the medium format space. I also like that it keeps the same shape and identity as all of their previous 645s. Actually, why wouldn't it?

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