Aspect Ratios In Photography

The Widelux is a film camera, no longer made. It has a rotating section with a vertical slit that scans across the film and produced wide images on 35mm film that are about two-and-a-third times as long as they are tall.

Then came the XPan film camera – a joint venture by Hasselblad and Fujifilm. The aspect ratio was even wider, producing images on 35mm film that are nearly two-and-three-quarters times as long as they are tall.

My Fuji x-T50 shoots natively at 3:2, but it can also shoot in 16:9 aspect ratio, which it does by masking off part of the sensor. It’s getting there but it is not that extreme, and I would really like a camera that can shoot at a wider aspect ratio.

This shot of the trees, below, was taken on my phone, using the MOOD app that shoots at a couple of aspect ratios, including this very long and narrow aspect ratio of 3:1.

The downside is, being an app on the phone, the quality is limited.

And here below is a gallery with three more photos taken with the MOOD app.

And that brings me to the next camera that has almost arrived on the scene, and that is the brainchild of the actor Jeff Bridges.

He has been using a Widelux for years, taking photos on the set of films he had been in.

He is now behind a company – Silverbridges – that is producing an updated version of the WIDELUX film camera – to be known as the WIDELUX•X – expected to be on the market within the next twelve months..

I wonder what it will retail at? Will it be kind of affordable? And what is ‘affordable’ in this modern world.

For example, a secondhand Widelux is around £1,300 and a Hasselblad Xpan body with the 45mm F4 lens in excellent condition would be around £3,000 from a dealer.

Of course one can always crop any photo taken with a camera to any aspect ratio in post processing, and that’s what I did with the photo at the top that I took in Austria in 2018 with my Fuji X100s.

But, there’s a world of difference between seeing the long narrow shape of the photo in the camera before you take the shot, compared to not seeing the letterbox shape until you crop the frame in Photoshop in post processing.

The thing is that the aspect ratio of the MOOD app made me want to take photos. Maybe 16:9 is wide enough. I’ll try it with the X-T50 and see what I will see.