Crazy Cameras

In memoriam of Michael Lawton

As this is our 150th collection we want to do something special. This one is called Crazy Cameras.

Since our eyes are side by side, not one over the other, we have a tendency to like long, horizontal pictures—enter Michael Lawton.

I met Michael while shooting in Romania in 1974. He was a fine photographer and he also built cameras.

Unfortunately I've always been "challenged" when it comes to technology, so the idea of me building a camera was completely out of my range. But as we became friends, Michael told me he could build me a handheld 35mm camera that would shoot three-frames wide, and without any distortion. And that’s exactly what he did for me—he made me three “crazy cameras”, each with a different wide angle focal length lens.

You can see a photograph of Michael holding one of his Crazy Cameras in an earlier collection of ours, Photogs I #61, second to last image.

All the photos in this collection were taken by me with a crazy camera. Without Michael none of this ultra-wide stuff would ever had come to life.

Thanks Michael. And much love.



Important note: For this collection we’ve added a zoom feature in order to view the details of these crazy-wide photographs. Simply pinch in on or hover-mouse-scroll your cursor over the photo to enlarge. You can then drag within the image to move to a different part of the photo.

As always, photographs look best on a large screen device, and though these photos will display on your smart phone you’ll definitely see more of the panoramic views, and their details, on a bigger screen.