Why Oscar-Winning Actor Jeff Bridges Loves His ‘Fickle’ Panoramic Camera

As part of a media tour for the second season of FX’s The Old Man, Jeff Bridges appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the two talk at length about Bridges’ love for the Widelux panoramic film camera, which he received as a wedding gift from his wife.

The Widelux is a relatively rare and expensive camera that captures panoramic images on either 35mm or 120 format film (Bridges seems to prefer the 35mm option). It was manufactured by the Japanese company Panon Camera Shoko and debuted in 1958. It uses a novel 26mm swing lens with a slit that pivots and acts as the shutter, slowly exposing an area onto a strip of film as it does so. It has a 126-degree field of view with an image size of 24x59mm. Because it’s panoramic, the negatives it produces are twice the standard 35mm frame width. It has a limited number of shutter speed options — 1/15, 1/125, and 1/250 — and set aperture values of 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, and 11.

While it features a viewfinder, it’s been described as “virtually useless” as it is better to compose a shot through the photographer’s field of vision and use the arrows on the top of the camera as basic guides.

Bridges’ love for the Widelux is not a secret — this isn’t even the first time he’s talked about it on a late-night talk show: he discussed it with Jimmy Kimmel four years ago.

“Most of the photographs I take are done with a Widelux camera. It’s a panning, still camera. I use the 35mm version. It’s got a 28mm lens that pans nearly 180 degrees. Instead of a traditional shutter, it has a slit that, as the lens pans, exposes the film,” Bridges writes on his website.

“The first time I came across one was in high school. We had been gathered together to take our class photo. The photographer had a Widelux. He explained how it worked. Some kids figured if they ran very quickly, they could beat the panning lens and be in the picture twice. They were right. Years later, I started using this technique to take pictures of actors creating the theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy. The result was someone frowning and smiling at himself — all on one negative.”

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

“The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t accurate, and there’s no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It’s something I aspire to in all my work — a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what’s there in the moment, and to 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 taking pictures professionally at the time, saw how much I enjoyed the photographs, she gave me a Wide-Lux as a belated wedding gift. I started carrying it around as a snap shot camera, taking pictures of family and friends. When I was making a movie, I sometimes took pictures there, too. The Wide-Lux frame is a lot like the 1:8:5 ratio of a typical movie. Because of its panning lens, it functions as sort of a bridge between still photography and moving pictures.”