Without spending thousands on a legendary Hasselblad X-Pan, what are the alternatives - and are they any good?

There are a few paths to take for panoramas on 35mm - cameras that offer a pano crop, dedicated cameras like the KMZ Horizont, or the one I tried - make your own!

There a many compacts and SLR’s that include a panorama feature, but they all have the same flaw - all they do is use a mask to crop the frame, thus reducing the image size and resolution. The camera I use for this is the Canon EOS Kiss IIIL…

Although this is quite fun, the images lack size! The grain is emphasized and I feel they need more - more clarity and more size.

I decided to use a medium format 6×9 camera to achieve this extra size. The camera is question is the Kodak Sterling II folder for 620 film. The process of converting it was simple enough - a 90×25mm frame mask was cut out of black mount board and secured in place with black electrical tape, 3D printed spool adapters were bought (but I ordered 120 ones by mistake!) and prompted butchered with a circular saw to reduce the size which ended badly! Plan B was just to use two 620 spools instead. This worked fine after wrapping a load of thin electrical tape at the top and bottom to keep the 35mm film in the centre.

Other things to do was the black out the frame window on the back, mark a point on the winder to count the three turns between each frame, and make a very fiddly little mask for the viewfinder - which was the downfall of the first test roll! Several of the frames had the horizon right at the bottom where the viewfinder mask was not right to compose properly.

I just about got away with this first image - I did compose to include the dark clouds, but with more foreground at the bottom!

The whole idea of this little fun project was to capture wide open landscapes, and the width is just right, it still maintains the perspective of the standard 105mm Anaston lens, which would not be possible using a wide angle lens on a 35mm SLR.

The image below was supposed to have a lot more foreground, and less sky, but I still like it.

To be honest I did rush through the roll as it was just a test really, but I think this could be a really fun thing to use again.

Before running another roll through this setup, I need to make a new viewfinder mask for sure, but everything else worked out quite well.

It is definitely no substitute for an X-Pan, and I would have got better results by using my Fujica G690, but for the cost it is great fun. The camera cost £9, and the modifications were just materials from around the house.

Loading and unloading the film was not too bad - done in a dark bag, as the film was wound directly onto the 620 spools. The biggest downfall though is the developing cost! It would have been cheaper to use standard size medium format film, and crop the panorama in post! This is due to the film having to be scanned manually rather than automatically by the lab.

However it is a better outcome than using the crop mask on a standard size frame in the Kiss IIIL, so I guess it is a win!

35mm panoramas on a budget…

Soviet Diamond - Almaz 103…