More Widelux & Panoram: Route 66

[doug grosjean]

Karl,

 

I hope the following isn't talking down to you. It's meant as a cheat sheet of errors I made while starting to play with swing-lens cameras, which is about 2 years so far.

 

Biggest thing on the swing-lens is keeping it level, ie, horizon in the middle of the frame. And level left-to-right, but that's not as critical as level front-to-back. I rubber band a carpenter's level to mine.

 

A tip - any straight line with a swing-lens in the middle of the frame will be straight. Any straight line above the middle will be bowed upward, any straight line below the middle will be bowed downward. Not much of a problem in nature, where straight lines are rare, but shooting buildings with a swing-lens the above will jump out at you.

 

Another tip - if you can borrow "America by the Yard" from your local library, get it. Great book of Cirkut photography. It'll give you ideas / inspiration for using your Panoram, and will illustrate many times the odd distortion in the paragraph above.

 

Oh, and one last thing - sometimes I will intentionally aim the camera mildly downward, to bow the horizon. Results are either brilliant or total crap, but always rather unique.

 

Have fun!

[karl_french1]

Doug-

 

Thanks for the advice. Those are great tips. I'll post some pix to my Flickr page once I get the chance to take it out for a spin.

 

Karl

[doug grosjean]

Oh, Karl... 3 more tips then.

 

One, on my Kodak Panoram the fresh film goes on a 620 spool, and the exposed goes onto a 120 spool. Yours may be different, I just don't know.

 

And the numebers in the red window - use 2, 6, 10, and 14. That'll give you even spacing, no overlap.

 

I tape the seams of my Panoram with gaffer's tape, and then keep it in a pouch, as it has minor light leaks. The light doesn't get onto the image area if I take those two steps, though it does still fog the extreme edge of the film along the top of the image. I'm tempted to try to seal it further by putting sealing foam into some of the intefaces between back of the camera and front, but mine is sort of a loose sloppy thing, so I don't know if I'd simply make it worse. Since it's pretty much solved with the above steps, I haven't done anything else with it.

 

FWIW, the aperture on the original is about f11, and the high speed shutter is 1/100, low speed about 1/50.

 

Hope that helps! Took me a bit to figure out the above.