Take My Picture, Jeff Bridges!

When he's not taking pictures on his movie sets, Bridges mainly focuses on capturing shots of his family. Especially, he often finds himself looking at photographs he's taken of his father over the years and thinking about the man who he says was not only a father but his acting teacher and mentor. One time, he recalls, Lloyd mysteriously disappeared; eventually, he was found locked in his office--and refusing to be disturbed. "We didn't know what the hell was going on," Bridges recalls. "This was around 1993, five years before he passed away." Finally, the elder Bridges came out. "He gathered us all around the table--we didn't know if he was going to read his will or what the hell was going to happen--and proceeded to tell us that he had been writing a screenplay that we would now shoot. It was called Robin of Bear. His grandson Dylan, Beau's son, wanted him to do this, so we spent two days producing this rather elaborate home movie. I documented it as I would a normal movie.

I love looking at those photographs. You can see how serious and how joyful he was working with his family."

Family is clearly important to the actor. He and his wife Susan have been married for 24 years. They have three daughters: Haley, 18; Jessie, 20 and about to go to Boston University, and Isabelle, 22, who attends Pepperdine University. It was Susan, in fact, who introduced Bridges to his favorite camera. "The Widelux camera is wonderful because the 28mm wide-angle lens is very forgiving," he says. "It allows me to get as close as I can to my subjects, sometimes within three feet." And because it has a panning lens, he says, "people are often unaware that I am shooting them because I am not pointing the camera at them. The lens will eventually get there."

He likes to look at all the pictures he's taken and reflect on the nature of his passion. "Indians have talked about how photographs can capture a person's soul. I don't know if I go into the capturing of the souls. Photographs capture the light and the shadows of that particular moment. The viewer supplies the soul part of it. It's the light and how it hits the face and the lens, whether it distorts at all, that makes a photograph distinctive."

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