Back in the day I worked for a (once) famous high street retailer of all things photographic, it was supposed to be part time but it never was....Anyway there were always trade-ins..swap your Nikon F3 for a Hewlett Packard 640K ?....yes I did that deal for someone, but it was the early adoption of Digital and the steep learning curve that came with it, not quite the Wild West but more the blind leading the blind.
So back to trade-ins...there were 2 I had my eye on..a Fuji GSW 690 or a mint condition Hasselblad Xpan...both for next to nothing so I chose the Fuji, I had a big old Durst enlarger set up and the extra big negatives were very appealing. Regrets about not taking the Hasselblad...oh yes, not just for the fact that it's value has rocketed but because of the format shape, I shoot a lot of wide angle and standard lens panoramas but I always had the itchy letterbox format in my head..gnawing away, always in my ear.
And here we are then, modern Digital imaging camera systems that correct all lens problems in-camera and with AI just around the corner as well, the letterbox itch is still scritchy and so I have gone ahead and bought a Sirui 50mm full frame T2.9 Anamorphic lens for my Nikon. I have so many ideas but first I have to start from basics, all manual no problem but then de-squeezing and distortion correction...off on a journey, lets see what I can see.