Jeff Bridges Unboxing Wideluxx Camera He Redesigned Is the Wholesome Video You Need Today

Jeff Bridges is a well-known and beloved actor, but the dude (pun intended) has also been into photography since high school. For decades, he has documented life on film sets with a panoramic Widelux F8 camera, capturing intimate, wide-format moments between takes that nobody else had access to.

Last year, Bridges launched Wideluxx, a redesigned version of the iconic camera he’d used for so long. And a video of him unboxing his “baby” is what I absolutely needed today – and I hope you’ll love it too.

[Related Reading: They love camera, and camera loves them: these 10 great actors are also great photographers]

Jeff Bridges’s photography work began as a personal project, privately printed into albums given as gifts to cast and crew. Eventually, it turned into two published photography books and an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. And all this time, the Widelux has been at the center of it all.

His wife, Susan, who was a professional photographer at the time, gave him a Widelux as a belated wedding gift. He started carrying it around as a snapshot camera, taking pictures of family, friends, and his film crew. The camera became his signature — a “missing link between still photography and moving pictures,” as he once described it.

Sadly, the last Widelux rolled off the production line in 2000, and the company that made it shut down in 2005 after a fire, taking all the original mechanical drawings with it. For years, the camera existed only as a secondhand treasure, selling for upwards of a couple of grand.

Then Bridges decided to bring it back. After so much photographic work, photo books, and an award, this seems like a cherry on top.

Together with the team at SilvergrainClassics, Bridges founded a new company named Silverbridges, and set about reverse-engineering the Widelux from scratch. This time, it was manufactured in Germany rather than Japan. The result is the Wideluxx, a 35mm panoramic camera shooting in a 2.7:1 format, built for the 21^st century.

And now we finally get to see Jeff’s reaction when he holds the finished product in his hands.

In the unboxing video, he opens the box with his beloved wife by his side. The same lovely woman who gave him the original camera as a wedding gift all those years ago. There are actually two cameras in the box, and Jeff is excited like a kid on Christmas morning. He immediately loads one with film, and the two of them take photos of each other before snapping a selfie together. At one point, he looks at the camera and says, “It looks like a real camera,” which I find particularly adorable. The childlike excitement in his eyes brought tears of joy to my eyes, honestly.

You can find out more about the Wideluxx at a dedicated website, which is where you can also watch the video – sadly, I can’t embed it here. But go ahead and visit the site, it’s worth watching if you need to decompress from the heaviness of the world.

[via DPReview; lead image credits: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

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