I own a wonderful camera, but I don’t use it nearly as often as I should. This neglected camera is a Hasslebald XPan panoramic film camera, users of new Fuji X’s will see where their camera takes its style inspiration from. It shoots 35mm film, but whilst the neg produced is the height of a standard 35mm neg, the width is similar to that of a 120 film neg – so you only get about 20 shots to a 36 exposure roll of film.
The reason I don’t use it is down to the extra weight I’d have carry as I would need that in addition to my dSLR that I carry. However, with improvements in digital photography in terms of quality and file size I now find myself cropping my digital files down to Xpan proportion (6.5 x 2.4) to give me a file that I am quite happy with and one that I can use for printing if I so wanted, without having to make stitch shots – which are quite frankly a faff.
I find myself seeing a shot and thinking “That would look good as an Xpan shot”, so I take the shot with the narrow panoramic crop in mind. I still miss using the Xpan, as it a wonderful and forgiving camera.
