Wide angle adapter

[Juancho]

Hi,
I'm using a Box Camera with 35 mm film to take 'panoramic' photos 24x90mm.
As I don't have an Wide Angle Adapter, I would like to know what could happen with my photos if I attach one to my camera: strong vignetting, fish eye effect, woudl work reasonably well for experiments only?
Best regards, and thanks.

 

[Rob-F]

It's a little hard to answer since the results would probably vary a lot depending on what adapter you use. The first thing I wonder about is how you fit the adapter to the camera, which probably has no provision for attaching anything to the lens. But then, if you managed to make a box camera work with 35mm film, you must be clever, so let's assume you can solve this.

The next thing is, how well suited, optically, will this adapter be for the camera's lens? You can get decent wide-angle adapters for a variety of cameras/lenses, I believe. They have been around a long time: Spiratone and other brands. Also, some are indeed fisheye adapters, to convert a rectilinear lens to fisheye perspective. So you can pick and choose, as far as that goes. It seems to me that such adapters are probably dirt-cheap on eBay, so you could pick up a few and try them out, then resell the ones that don't work--if you want to put that much effort into it. I think that vignetting, as well as image quality at the edges and corners, will depend a lot on how well matched the adapter is to the camera's optical system. The only way to know is to try!

 

[Juancho]

Thanks for your answer. I'll keep trying.
Best regards.

 

[veraikon]

May be the article "Adaptateur grand angle" from Jérôme Dumont in "Passion xpan" (September 2007) is interesting for you:

http://xpan.free.fr/id94.htm

(seulement en francais 😉 )

 

[Juancho]

The Adapteur article is great for me.
Thanks!

 

[pvdhaar]

What I've found when using a wide angle adapter on still cameras, was that they tend to emphasize shortcomings of the lens they're mounted on. I tried a Sony wide converter with 52mm thread (I believe it was 0.75x) on a Nikon 50mm AFD, and even with these modern optics, the pictures showed notable loss of sharpness away from the center. Colour pictures also got a sort of 'metallic zing' to them. Hard to quantify, but that's the best way to describe it..