Into The Great Wide Open
A Life Long Love for Ultrawide Lenses
Foto.Feola.Friday for April 11, 2025
Eddie waited 'til he finished high school
He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo
He met a girl out there with a tattoo, too
The future was wide open
They moved into a place they both could afford
He found a night club he could work at the door
She had a guitar and she taught him some chords
The sky was the limit
Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
Foto.Feola.Friday
I have a million lenses of every category and description, but my wides and ultrawides have always best fit my eye. I’m not sure I can fully explain it. I guess the closest I can come is that I’ve always preferred to shoot environmental images. That is, if I’m shooting someone’s portrait I try to capture them at home in their environment with everything in frame and in focus. It’s the exact opposite of the currently fashionable “portrait mode,” which isolates subjects.
I’ve been scanning some film for some reviews I’ve been working on, including several shots taken with Kodak Tri-X in a Voigtlander Bessa R rangefinder and the Voightlander 12mm F5.6 Aspherical, which was the widest rectilinear wide-angle lens for 35mm film when it came out. I bought the Bessa system just to get that lens, along with a few other lenses so I could carry a Bessa bag when I wanted. Shot a lot of film with the Voightanders. Shooting a rangefinder is fun! Sold them off when I went mostly digital. But I kept the 12mm and use it with an adapter on my Sony a7rii. Shooting old film glass on digital is quite hit and miss. The 12mm, alas, is kind of a miss. The shots just look flat and lifeless compared to, say, my Zeiss Batis 18mm f/2.8 Lens on the Sony. Ah well. Here are a few shots from the Voightlander 12mm on the Bessa R rangefinder loaded with Tri-X.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Sunday, April 13th — Prompt Engineering for an AI Powered Virtual Newsroom; We’ve found a way to build Virtual Newsroom, a set of low and no-cost tools that can fertilize the flowering of thousands of new newsrooms. We want to make it viable for individual journalists and small teams to successfully cover, say, a small town or school district with nothing more than a cheap laptop and an internet connection.