The 'longfellow' 6x18 medium format panoramic camera

The 'Longfellow' is a medium format panoramic camera that utilizes fused bodies of two 6x9 folders. The Super angulon 90 was mounted on a cone. The two backs were held using a fish plate. Though not combined into a single piece,the two pressure plates can hold the film flat quite adequately. The resulting format is 6x18.
 

The details of construction appears in the book "Medium and large format photography: moving beyond 35mm for better pictures" By Roger Hicks and Frances Schultz, well known for their other books on photography as well. Information on  a few other handmade cameras including one made by Roger also appears in the book.

Some discussion in this context can be found in this forum post.  I thank Mr. Hicks for granting permission to use these picture. His website http://rogerandfrances.com/ is a goldmine of information on many type of cameras and photographic techniques. Keep an eye over the site contents, as soon a 'how to make it' section will appear there. 

The Leme rotational panoramic camera

This is a rotational panoramic camera from Brazil, designed by Sebastião Carvalho Leme (1918-2007). The camera is able to take 360°panoramas.

For more details of the camera visit this wikipedia entry

The picture of the camera is under GFDL licensese, the details of the which is available here

Handmade rotational panoramic camera by Mats Wernersson

 

A very nice example of a rotational panoramic camera handmade by  Mats Wernersson. In these type of cameras, the body of the camera rotates while exposing a continuous strip of film through a small slit and capable of scanning a 360 degrees sector.

The Seitz Roundshot, Hulcherama and the recent Lomo Spinner 360 fall into this category of cameras. This particular camera is made of PVC plastic and utilizes medium format film. To know about more on rotational panoramic cameras covered in my blog, click here.

The details of the camera including construction snapshots are available here.

I thank Mats for allowing me to use this picture. Mats have a great website on his own handmade cameras that include many novel analog and digital systems. Visit his site at http://cameramaker.se

Exhibition of panoramics taken by the 'Pannaroma' camera

There will be a month long exhibition of panoramic photographs at New Orleans, LA taken by different photographers using the "Pannaroma" camera. 

For more details visit this site .

For those who are interested to know about this 1:3 aspect ratio, flatback 35 mm panoramic camera, made by Thomas Roma, check this blog post.

For more posts related to Roma's camera in my blog, follow this link.

The work of Gilles Peress, Raghubir Singh, and others will be part of the exhibit. Though I'm quite familiar with  Raghubir Singh's work, never knew that he used the Pannaroma :-(

Thanks to Olaf Matthes who pointed out this event to me.

The Digital Horizon panoramic camera

The  Italian Silvestri company is working in collaboration with the Russian Zenit company to produce a digital panoramic camera. The Zenit is well known for its Horizon(t) series of swing lens panoramic cameras.

The new camera would feature three built in units of 5MP sensor and a f/3.5 28 mm lens, and three pictures will be taken simultaneously followed by in camera stiching to produce the final panorama. Because of simultaneous capture, moving objects will not pose any problem.

You can find more information from the following links available from Photoscala, British Journal of Photography and a very informative post by Michael Przewrocki.

A pdf information brochure on this camera can be found here.

A very useful tool for retrieving dead sites

Many great web pages become defunct in course of time. There's a very handy tool to retrieve the information from dead web sites, provided  they are archieved. You can just paste your dead link in THIS web site and if you're lucky you might be able to look at the lost contents.

I fetched the contents of many photography related sites like that of Robert Monaghan's medium format site ( and sites mentioned there)  using this tool.

A good short read on panoramic photography

I miss Marco Pauck's panoramic web site which went defunct. Here's a short but interesting account of panoramic photography, by Marco, particularly using the Horizon 202 swing lens camera.

The great handmade panoramic cameras of Josip Klarica-II

This is another great panoramic camera from Josip Klarica's collection. Marked #6 in his web page http://obscuranova.com, this is a medium format swing lens panoramic camera. 

Constructed by Duro Susic, Prague, Czech Republic, this takes 6x18 panoramic images. The lens is a Meopta 75 mm f/2.8 and three shutter speeds of 1 sec, 1 / 30 sec and 1 / 100 sec are available. The material of construction is metal and leather.

Mr. Clarica has a very distinctive style of photography and to know more details of it visit his website http://obscuranova.com and this link

I thank Mr. Klarica very much for providing the detailed description and  high resolution pics of this camera. You can download the rest of the pics from here. Please note that the copyright for the photographs of the camera belong to Josip Klarica and you may need his permission  for using any of them.