Homemade Panoramic Camera
This weekend I finished making the first panoramic camera and got a chance to shoot some film in it. Overall the results were less than desirable but I learned a lot from the process and I think I’m going to keep working on building more homemade cameras. The shot I was taking above appears in the left frame on the picture below.
10th Street & Boston Ave. (left) and Bartlet Square during Mayfest (right), 8 minute exposures
The good parts:
- Apertures Photo was able to develop the film with no problems. Ended up costing less than $5.
- I got 7 shots from a 36 exposure roll of film. I could have got more but my winding mechanism isn’t great.
- No light leaks (or very little light leaks at least). I was worried and adapted the Battlefield Pinhole Camera design I started from to include more light blocking measures, but I wasn’t sure if they were enough.
- I didn’t overexpose any shots too badly. I didn’t underexpose the shots too badly either. For not really knowing what I was doing I guessed … close.
- The gorillapod I got did a decent job for a tripod. It was able to attach to most surfaces outside and after some manipulating I could get it to stay mostly still.
- The website at mrpinhole.com guided my calculation of the image circle and it seemed to do a good job. I wanted an image circle that would coer 3 135mm film frames (each being 26mm in width I think).
- Turns out the ebay laser drilled pinhole I bought really does work right, I thought it was broken when I mounted it on my digital camera but all the shots came out fuzzy. Not blurry from motion of the camera, just always fuzzy.
The bad parts:
- Panoramic prints, but not very “wide angle looking”. Effective aperture of the camera was 45mm.
- Gaffers tape is stronger than it looks, and I was having a hard time getting it off the pinhole.
- Low image quality, a side effect of the camera moving, it being a pinhole camera, and it being night. The battlefield’s shots look cool because of the 3 stacks of film layered together.
- Scanning at home wasn’t exactly… good. I’m glad I chose to use black and white otherwise I’d have to correct the color which wouldn’t have worked out so well.
- Aperture photo wanted $5 per image to scan these to a file, and then another $6ish to burn them to a CD. That seems expensive to me, I guess. For something more important I’d be willing to pay that but this was just a hobby and 7 exposures would have ended up costing $46. Not worth it. I know they were doing something like 4000dpi scans but all I really needed was a low resolution file that I could post to the web. No qualms though, developing prices were really really nice.
- Alignment. Not one photo seems to be aligned properly. I didn’t think it’d be too bad but I need to work on that in the future. I attached a viewfinder from one of the film cameras I took apart to try and help but it didn’t really help all that much.
- Need to find a better way to clean my scanner bed and each negative, you can see dust particles on some of the photos.
More photos:
Bank of Oklahoma Tower displaying letters “SHK” (tried to find out why it was SHK but couldn’t figure anything out), 8 minute exposure connected to a lamp post
3rd Street & Boston Ave., 10 minute exposure sitting on a Tulsa World newspaper stand (wanted to capture the people standing under the street sign but they didn’t show up)
21st Street Bridge and Sun Refinery, 6 minute exposure connected to my roommates balcony railing (first shot taken, not very good but you can see the bridge and the river)