Richard Moore was a successful cinematographer who filmed the screen version of the musical Annie (1982) and worked with Steve McQueen, Burt Lancaster and repeatedly with Paul Newman. More significantly, perhaps, he was also the co-founder of the Panavision camera company and did significant pioneering work with lenses.

Moore started off in documentaries and in the early 1950s he and Robert Gottschalk experimented with anamorphic lenses in underwater photography. Anamorphic lenses “squeeze” the image horizontally during shooting, allowing a wider area to be captured on film. It can later be “stretched” to produce a widescreen image. They founded Panavision in 1953 and the company specialised initially in anamorphic lenses.

Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1925, Richard Moore spent his first few years on a farm, though the family moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s. He studied naval science and cinema during two stints at the University of Southern California, interrupted by war service in the US Navy. He worked with Gottschalk in a camera shop in Los Angeles, made documentaries and travelogues and served as a representative for Arriflex cameras.

His experiments with anamorphic lenses coincided with developments in commercial widescreen cinema. The widescreen Cinerama process had needed three cameras. Twentieth Century Fox’s CinemaScope process used only one and employed anamorphic technology, developed to improve the field of vision in army tanks. The company that was originally lined up to make the lenses for the projectors experienced problems and Moore’s fledgling Panavision stepped into the breach. Panavision soon began producing lenses for cameras too and expanded from there.

In 1960 Moore, Gottschalk and Douglas Shearer of MGM received a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “for the development of a system of producing and exhibiting wide film motion pictures known as Camera 65”. The first film to be presented in this new 70mm process was Ben-Hur (1959).

Moore left Panavision in the mid-1960s to pursue his film career, shooting underwater scenes for Thunderball (1965), which featured memorable combat scenes between small armies of frogmen. He was cinematographer on the TV series Daktari (1966-69), Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966), with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra, Sydney Pollack’s The Scalphunters (1968), with Burt Lancaster, The Reivers (1969), starring Steve McQueen, and Myra Breckinridge (1970), in which Raquel Welch plays a woman who used to be a man.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Moore worked regularly with Paul Newman, beginning with the racing drama Winning (1969), for which Moore designed a system that used radio signals to operate a camera on Newman’s racing car. They also worked together on WUSA (1970) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).

Moore directed one film, the David Carradine martial arts movie The Silent Flute (1978), a belated attempt to cash in on the success of Carradine’s TV series Kung Fu. Annie was his last feature film and his first for several years.

In 2005 Moore was given the President’s Award from the American Society of Cinematographers for exceptional contributions to advancing the art of filmmaking. Richard Crudo, the ASC president, said: “Richard Moore enjoyed one of the most interesting and exciting careers I’m aware of. Not only did he do great work as a cinematographer, but he was also an inventor and innovator of the highest order . . . He remains a true inspiration, artist and scientist.”

Moore is survived by a son.

Richard Moore, cinematographer and co-founder of Panavision, was born on October 4, 1925. He died on August 16, 2009, aged 83