While in graduate school in 1981 I entered a national photography competition and wone top prize. I took the prize money and purchased a Widelux panoramic camera. It had a rotating lens and could make 130-degree panoramic imagery. It was a fun and unusual way to see the world. I really loved that camera and burned my way thru 4 or 5 of them over the years. They were very finicky and would break down if you looked at them crossed eye. The internal workings amounted to a couple of springs and perhaps a rubber band or two. But it was so much fun to play with. I tried other, more conventional approaches to making pans, but they weren’t the same. It was the distortion that made the images so cool. Kind of like the iPhone does now… go figure.
