What the ‘H’ is Anamorphic??? Actually you have seen it before but never knew what it was called. CinemaScope, Panavision and other wide screen movies were filmed with anamorphic lenses that would squeeze the wide screen image on to the 35mm film format. When you see these movies on TV, the horses and riders are tall and thin because the TV format cannot produce the full image. In the theater another anamorphic lens is used to unsqueeze the image and fill the wide screen. Because current projection is digital, the old anamorphic projection lenses can be found on auction sites. These lenses can be mounted onto a camera lens and then used on a modern digital camera. My anamorphic lens is a Singer/Sankor 16D projection lens that I mount on a Nikon 100mm Series E lens. Forget finding an actual ‘taking’ lens, they are in great demand by cinematographers. The projection lenses are not easy to use because you must focus the anamorphic and the taking lenses separately but the images it produces are quite unique. They seem to have the perspective of the 100mm lens but have the nice wide background of a wide angle lens. My favorite thing about anamorphic is the flare. You will notice this in movies where the lights flare across the screen. (Most of the flare is faked digitally now days but we won’t go there.) To add to the cinematic look, I crop my images to the standard 2.4:1 cinema format. BTW: I like the 2.4:1 cinema format and often crop many of my non-anamorphic photos to that.