"The Rochester" a huge, glorious pipe organ being built by Paul Fritts & Company ( see the audio slideshow ) nearly fills the room in which it is being built. It's hard to move back far enough to see the whole thing at once, let alone photograph it.

For our story on Fritts & Co., the lead shot needed to convey its immensity, but with the widest lens we have, a 14mm, I couldn't get the whole thing into the viewfinder of my Nikon D2H. I needed a wider lens, but they are hard to come by. Or I needed a camera with a "full-frame sensor" to fully utilize the wide angle 14mm.

THE EXPLANATION: Most of the cameras and interchangeable lenses over the last half century have been based on the "35mm standard". These lenses produce an image that is just large enough to cover the 35mm film frame which actually measures at 24mm by 36mm. But the image sensors of most digital cameras-- mine included-- are smaller than this, and you get the same result as if you had cropped the image from a 35mm camera. Which means that a really wide lens like the 14mm produces a not-so-wide view in my camera-- equivalent to a 21mm wide angle lens on a "full-frame" 35mm camera.

Here's a simulation of what the shot would look like using my D2H:

Not being able to shoot with a really wide lens annoys me regularly, but in this case, it would actually prevent me from getting the most important shot of this story-- unless I could get my hands on a full-frame body. Renting one from Glazer's in Seattle would cost $200. Knowing we couldn't spend that much money, I posed the problem to my boss, Jeremy Harrison, our high-tech whiz.

He pondered for a moment or two, then suggested a low-tech solution: How about using the 14mm lens on a film body?

I whacked myself on the forehead. Duh. I guess that's why he earns the big bucks.

I hadn't used a film body for almost seven years. I found an old clunker, an FM2 with busted meter and no motor drive, bought some film, shot the photo (using a digital camera as a kind of light meter), took the film to Bartell's, and had to resurrect our old Kodak film scanner that runs on an older Mac with OS 9 to get the image into PhotoShop.

This was cumbersome, but it all worked.

Later, reader Brian Harrison asked: why is there no distortion? Answer: all wide angles have distortion.

If it's a "rectilinear" type (which all of them are except fisheye lenses), there is "marginal distortion" in which straight lines stay straight, but the edges of the image get stretched. But this isn't so apparent in most photos.

In the organ picture it's most apparent when you look in the lower right corner at the bottom of the lift's scissor mechanism. Its shape is that of an very oblique parallelogram. It's more oblique than you'd see if you looked at the mechanism with your eye, and more oblique than it would be if the same lens were pointed directly at the bottom of the lift. The fact that the mechanism's bottom is at the edge of the picture is what makes it stretched.

This kind of distortion is commonly seen in group shots with a wide lens. At the edge of the shot people's heads become egg-shaped.

Yet, if you use an extreme wide angle lens and take a picture of brick wall (with the camera pointed straight at the wall) the bricks won't be distorted. Even the corner bricks will be properly shaped.

Alternatively, if the wide lens is a fisheye, people's heads will stay properly shaped at the edges of the photo, but the lines of bricks will curve in the photo no matter what you do.