Hand made film camera group(s) in popular social media

I found the Facebook group "Hand made film camera" to be  a very useful resource. This is a group with over 10K members and frequented by many well known panoramic camera makers.

You can find the works of Dirk Fletcher, Freeman Lin, Steve Smith, Andrew Bieber, Giorgio Giovanni Maria Jano, Marco Kroeger and many others. Marco's cameras demand a separate post altogether and I'll write one soon. Search the groups with terms like "panoramic" and "panorama" and you'll get many hits.

I'll keep this post updated as I find more such groups in social media. 

A Blog on Panoramic Photography

I just found a very nice panoramic photography blog. The site is in French which can be translated to your language of choice by Google translator. The blog features many reviews, history, collection of panoramic photos and many more

http://modepanoramique.blogspot.com/

Meet Dick Haviland, the last film re-spooler man standing

I recently came across the following  nice article on Dick Haviland , who runs the film re-spooling company "Films For Classics". The article was published in  B&H's website.

You can read the article here 

The Mercury Universal Camera project

This Mercury Universal Camera project looks very interesting and promising, Initiated by Zach Horton and others, this would be a real multiformat systems/modular camera able to be configured with a variety of film formats and cognate lenses.  Wish they include a 35mm panoramic back.

The details of the camera can be found here
A long discussion on it can be found at this APUG Thread

A note on broken website links in my blog posts

My blog is more than eight years old now and many of the URLs I've provided went defunct over the years.

It is unfortunate to say the least that so many informative sites can no longer exist. However, for some of them the information can be recovered at least partially if the site has been archived.

For those who don't know how to check if a site is archived, please go to the"Wayback Machine" at 

https://archive.org/ . 

Paste the link in the Wayback Machine text box and check if the site is archieved or not. In some cases you would see multiple snapshots of the page taken at different times. Check for a date/year closest to date of publication of that particular blog post where I mention about the web site. If your lucky you might be able to retrieve  some information at least. 

Secondly, if you come across any site you think worth archiving, you can submit that web link to the "Save Now" feature of Wayback's archiving tool. 

For a detailed method of archiving, please read this information:

https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something/

Enjoy some european panoramas

A very good site for european panoramas http://superpanoramas.com/eu/english/index.asp. Enjoy some more photos here.

The PANNAROMA exhibition

 

As mentioned in my earlier blog post the month long exhibition of the Panoramic photographs taken by Tomas Roma's 35 mm 1:3 flatback camera is now ongoing. The works of at least fifteen distinguished photographers including veterans like Lee Friedlander as well as many younger ones will be part of the exhibit.

More details of the exhibition (and history of the camera including how the idea was conceived plus design notes ) along with some of the panoramic photographs taken by participating photographers are available from  http://pannaroma.wordpress.com/. Click on the name of the individual photographers to view the panoramas.   

The highlights of the exhibition and a high resolution picture  of the camera can be found here .

I thank Mr. Stephen Hilger  very much for providing the information.

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.

Exhibition of handmade cameras in Japan

I recently came across this pdf document  from "Photographic History society of Canada" about a handmade camera exhibition at Japan Camera Museum in Tokyo. It appears to me that  a number of handmade panoramic cameras were part of the exhibit.

It would be great if readers of this blog, particularly those from Japan provide some more information about the exhibits, particularly on the panoramic cameras.

Visit the website of Japan Camera Museum http://www.jcii-cameramuseum.jp/ (or a google translated version of it) for many interesting exhibits.

The website of Photographic History society of Canada is http://www.phsc.ca/

History of the 'Enhancing' filter

I quite often use the 'redhancer' filter. In fact it is my second most used filter after the polarizer. I own a Cokin P sized one and another made by Marumi, Japan. I rediscovered this article written by the inventor of enhancing filter, Howard G Ross from Robert Monaghan's medium format site recently.

A very good page on filters exist in Bob's archived site. To visit that page click here.

It would be great if someone can provide me a picture of Ross' enhancing filter.

The Photographica 73 show by PHSNE

Recently I've been to the Photographica 73 show organized by Photographic Historical Society  of  New England (PHSNE). This bi-annual event  offers members and the public an opportunity to browse and buy new and vintage photographic items that include cameras,lenses, accessories and old prints.


I was lucky enough to pick up a handmade 127 format  panoramic camera for $12 (!!!). I'll write about it sometime later.

If you're interested, visit the PHSNE website to know about their activities including auctions and about the next Photographica show.