Panoramas shot on film – Zenza Bronica ETRSi 135W

Film by Miika

When you combine medium format camera with 135 film, you get panoramas. I recently shot my very first roll with this kind of panorama set up.

Zenza Bronica ETR -series cameras have often been overlooked as a medium format cameras, because they “only shoot” 6×4,5 cm negatives, when the “proper” ones shoot 6×6 and even larger 6×9 cm negatives. I don’t know if 6×4,5 is enough to get that “medium format look“, but when you use a panoramic film back, you get a very distinctive look nevertheless. The panoramic film back essentially enables you to use 35mm film in medium format camera, which normally uses 120 film. When loaded into the camera, both films span equally wide, but 120 film is 6cm high when the 35mm is only 2,4 mm high, resulting in panorama format 24×55 mm. Normal 35mm negative is exposed as 24x36mm.

The pictures

So there. That’s the nerdy side of things, here are some examples of the pictures:

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The viewfinder in the camera has no markings for panorama mode, so you can only estimate the composition. I did draw some lines with a pen to help me frame the pics, but the lines were not very accurate. Still like this composition!
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I remember cutting the chimney in my viewfinder, but there is plenty of room above it here! 🙂
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Was changing my summer tires and took a product photo of a film camera. Can you name this seldom seen compact?
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Love locks in the bridge at Tammerkoski rapids.
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I actually forgot to load a battery into the camera before shooting the roll. This means every shot was taken at 1/500 of a second. Kameratori did their best to rescue most of the pictures, but quite a few became unusable, because of very severe underexposure. This one came out alright!

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I think panoramas are well suited for blog pictures, the wide but short format works well in terms of scroll-down efficiency! 🙂 When uploading the pictures to Instagram, I have to create a bit of a border to make the total picture 16:9 aspect ratio. Otherwise IG crops part of the panorama away.

I really like the panorama format and really look forward to spending the summer with the camera!

Thanks to Kameratori for scan and develop!