I built an anamorphic 35mm rig, I put a roll of HP5+ through it. Here are the results.

Super cool!

awty said:

I picked up a very old basic type. Has two single curved lenses that distance can be adjusted.
I cant seem to get it to focus with a camera, not sure how I can use it. Do you need to use a lens or could I couple it up to a lens board and use it direct?
No idea, cost $10 + postage, figured I could find some use for it. Was hoping to be able to use the distortion.

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That looks like an old magic lantern attachment; could be quite old.

Just found this; not sure it would do the job:

awty said:

I cant seem to get it to focus with a camera, not sure how I can use it.

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First question is, is it a positive lens? If so, it should work as a magnifying glass. It's also pretty likely that the focus is too short for whatever camera you tried it with -- can you focus an image on a surface with just the lens, out of the camera?

awty said:

I picked up a very old basic type. Has two single curved lenses that distance can be adjusted.
I cant seem to get it to focus with a camera, not sure how I can use it. Do you need to use a lens or could I couple it up to a lens board and use it direct?
No idea, cost $10 + postage, figured I could find some use for it. Was hoping to be able to use the distortion.

View attachment 344357

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I think most of the attachments people were talking about on the first page of this thread are afocal attachments for anamorphic projection. (The ebay links posted on the first page no longer work, so more descriptions with words would have been helpful.) Anamorphic means a different reproduction ratio in horizontal and vertical axes (accomplished with cylindrical rather than spherical cross section). Afocal means the lens itself doesn't have a focal length or focusing power. Like a teleconverter, or those cheesy front mount wide or tele converters. You have to use them with a main lens that makes images. Most of the easily available surplus anamorphic attachments were designed to go over a projection lens, for ex so that a normal aspect ratio cinema format could be used to project a widescreen image.

Since I started this thread the way of shooting anamorphic by hanging a projector lens off of a standard lens and focusing both has become somewhat obsolete.

A bunch of companies out of the East have been releasing single focus and close focus native anamorphic lenses. And they're not crazy expensive. For me they're pretty pricey but they're not crazy money.

I'm waiting for a sub $500 EF mount one of these lenses to come out.