Panoramic 6 x 14 for under US$50

clarence

ダメ
Local time
7:38 AM
Joined
Feb 11, 2005
Messages
977
Hello,

The panoramic format always enthralled me, but the costs were a barrier to entering this particular realm. The cheapest 35mm panoramic camera would probably be a Horizon, and even a used model would cost over a hundred pounds.

I learnt about the Nimslo, a financial disaster with 4 separate lenses that created photographs with the illusion of 3-dimensionality. The wonder of it, though, was that it could be gutted and transformed into a homemade panoramic camera:
http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-nimslo.html

Someone else who made a Nimslo panoramic has photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/photo-montage/

But having little experience with disembowelling cameras and inter-species mating, I dared not experiment with any of that. In any case, I was dreaming of medium-format panoramas. 35mm was for me, always too much of a compromise. Huge Fuji rangefinders danced daily in my head, always frustratingly out of reach.

Then I came across this:
http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/postcard.html

For less than US$50 in equipment and supplies, one could fashion an adapter to use 120 rollfilm in an ancient 5 1/2" x 3 1/4" rangefinder/viewfinder camera. There was no surgery, no lens hacking to be done at all. Suddenly, it seemed possible for me to get those 6 x 14 negatives and transparencies that I had always dreamed of.

Can it be true?


Clarence
 
Andrew Davidhazy is quite the technician. I have seen some cameras that he has built. They are quite amazing.
 
I'm wondering which cameras might be those 122 film cameras that Robert Monaghan speaks of. Is there an easy way to find that out somehow? I don't think most eBay sellers know the difference between 120, 220, 127 or 122 film.
 
Back
Top Bottom