Going Panoramic in the fog

I have never worked with any kind of panoramic equipment before. I have held a Hasselblad X-pan in my hand at one point, but I never tried shooting it. Even so, panorama photography is interesting, and I have wanted to give it a proper try. Not that I will really try it properly in this entry, but I recently bought some very cheap 3D-printed (I guess) plastic parts off eBay. Specifically, the small plastic parts that you use for using 35mm film in your medium format cameras. To be honest, I didn’t really expect much results from this. My anticipation was the following:

1. The film will not be kept dark enough after exposure and will be fogged.
2. The film might not be kept flat enough in the camera.
3. Composing the image will be difficult not having a proper viewfinder for it.
4. Unknown amount of images pr film and difficult to know how far to wind.

I decided to give it a try in my Zeiss Ikon Nettar. This because it is the only MF camera I have where the film is inserted in the horisontal direction, allowing me to easily shoot landscape without turning my camera into portrait. I decided to go for a roll of Ilford Delta 400 and go for a little walk while the fog was lifting over the lake. I was looking for wide compositions, which was a new experience for me, and I felt that I often reverted back to looking for squares or normal rectangles rather than the super wide compositions that this line-up would allow for.

First of all, I can confirm the first part of my assumption. Using this system, with the 3D-printed parts, will give you severe light leaks between the shots. I know for a fact that it is not the light seals acting up, because I used black tape to ensure no light-leaks would come from that area.

For the most part, I think that the film stayed flat in the camera, and that the adapter kept it reasonably well aligned throughout the roll. I did; however, notice that the film was not as «in the middle» of the viewfinder as I had thought, and I shot a few of the frames «too high» losing parts of my intended compositions.

Even though I like some of these images and the way they look and how they turned out, I am not certain I would use this adaptor system a lot. I will very likely do some more experiments with it and try it out at different occasions, and maybe I am luckier with my next rounds and avoid some light leaks. I find the system to be functional for shooting only one frame at a time. This would mean a lot of «cutting the film out of the camera» and «developing fragments of a roll». Not that I mind doing that, but it is a hassle.