YOU ME AND US
Bob Grimes
I suppose you are wondering why I have been invited to submit an article to this — and your — magazine?
"What1’ you may well be thinking, "has Bob Grimes, the former International Widescreen Association Chairman and former Editor of it’s magazine ‘WIDESCREEN’ got to do with us?"
Its a very good question and quite logical!. So let’s ‘have a quick explanation. By the time you have read this, I think you will find we have a lot in common.
My own interest in widescreen photography started way back in 1970. 1 became a very active member of the Widescreen Association as soon as I joined it and only retired from the two positions mentioned above la~t year. In the early days most of my photography’ was confined to widescreen filming. In fact I wrote about it on a regular basis for about three years for the now non existent magazine ‘Film Making’. During the mid 70’ s, people began. to want to take still pictures in widescreen and, to cut a long story short, they did. I now write, regularly for the IAC magazine end- I’m currently writing about widescreen slide photography.
But lets go back to the year 1968, it was then that I did my own colour slide processing. I used Ferrania reversal film and the 3M kit. If my memory serves me correctly and it often doesn’t nowadays! it took a laborious 94 minutes to complete. Mind you- had memory accepted I can still recall the excitement when a roll of film was taken out of the tank in glorious colour!.
However, the home processing bug didn’ t last very long and it wasn’t until about five years ago that I djd some more, this time using Barfen film and kit, timewise, this was more appealing because the process took about 30 minutes.
In recent years my own cine filming has taken a back seat as I now favour the taking of slides, albeit in widescreen. The connection we have therefore basically is that you ‘process em’ and. I ‘show em’.
No doubt many of you are familiar with an anamorphic lens (more affectionately termed an A -lens) but if there are some that are not then without going into a great deal of detail I will just explain a little bit about such a lens.
It is a compression lens - or if you prefer, a ‘squeeze’ lens. Everything that is photographed with it will faithfully be recorded on film in a compressed fashion. If you look at film photographed with this lens you will observe that everything on film is tall and thin- it has been compressed. The A lens is also •a wide angle lens with a difference, although it takes a much wider angled picture, unlike an ordinary wide angle camera lens, (cine or still) it only records additional information on the width, no extra information is recorded top or bottom such as happens with an ordinary wide angle lens • The A lens also has what is known as a compression factor, in other words, the degree of compression applied by it. In this respect there are three different compression factored lenses. They are: a 1.5 times compression, 1.75 times and 2 times. (These are usually shown. as 1 .5x, 1 .75x and 2x. Each one gives a different ratio on the screen.)
Now this’ lens "is placed in front of the camera lens for the taking of the picture arid in front of the projector for showing the picture. (cine and still). If you are wealthy, then perhaps you would buy two! On the projector, the opposite and desired effect takes place, the’ picture is de-compressed and made’ wider, depending on which compression factored lens you have used.
Maybe you have beard of WIDEX, It is the annual convention of the Widescreen Association and is usually a one day event, although several times it has been a two day event and on one occasion it was a six day event, when we celebrated our 21st year.