Picture This: a gadget to remember
Jan. 28—Decades ago, before the advent of modular camera strap "systems," we had what were known as "gadget bags." The gadgets they held could be anything from star filters to radioactive (faintly) anti-static film brushes.
One gadget I recently revisited has to be among the funniest — at least potentially — of all time: the "Panagor Mirror Circle Anglescope." That's a fancy brand name for what amounted to a bit of a spy gadget. You'd screw this thing onto the front of your lens. It has a mirror set at a 90 degree angle, so if you pointed your camera straight ahead, your camera saw what was to the left or right of you.
The idea was, of course, that people would assume you are photographing something in front of you, but you'd be spying on someone or something else.
We saw these things for sale in the back pages of photographic magazines in the 1970s and 80s, but I see that you can still get them today.
I'm not sure who got fooled by this contraption (a word I don't use enough), or what it really accomplished. I'm also not entirely sure it is ethical, but that's is a muddy grey area. After all, photojournalists like me often try to cover events from the shadows and around corners so we don't foul the scene with our presence. Rest easy that I am not likely to use this thing as a photojournalist, since even a suggestion of unethical imaging can be bad for journalism in the "age of fake news," but I guess I could use it to fool my pets into being more candid.
My photography friend Robert from Tulsa gave it a try Thursday at the ECU basketball games, an environment so public that everyone pretty well understands that they are fair game to be photographed. It's not an immediately easy task, since the mirror makes everything backwards left-to-right. It also isn't really an optical element, so image quality is about that of a makeup mirror.
It was fun to mess around with this primitive photo tech, and a reminder of the photography gadget scene from the half a century ago.
