Panorax Zi panoramic camera

The Japanese Panorax Zi panoramic camera offers an unusual design. With a 360 degree horizontal coverage it was designed by Hiroshi Mito in 1954. It uses 35 mm film, though variants using other smaller and larger film formats were reported to exist.

This is a rare camera and the price varied around ten grands, the last time I saw in this ebay offer.

For a summary of features of Panorax (and many other pano cameras)visit the site of Massimo Bertacchi .

For more elaborate descriptions on this and other unusual classic cameras visit SPIRA .

Disclaimer: I'm no way related to the ebay seller and not endorsing any way his/her items

Panoramic camera construction guides (1)

Numerous examples of handmade panoramic camera can be found in the internet or in some printed materials. However, detailed guide for construction of such cameras are quite scanty. It often becomes very frustrating for a beginner to understand from where to start with, when building such a camera system.

SERENDIPITY SYSTEMS offers construction guides for a number of different panoramic cameras from easily available materials. These guide manuals are very cheap and contain easy to follow instructions.

The currently available guides include 6x17, 6x12 and 35mm panoramic camera construction. Soon, a 6x24 construction guide will be made available.

One can preview the blue prints from their website http://www.xtremedigitalphotography.com or visit the Ebay Store directly for purchase.

Disclaimer: I'm no way related to the seller and not endorsing any way his/her products

Handmade 6x12 panoramic camera

Another novel design that was offered by the ebay seller 'mn_2oox' was a 6x12 panoramic camera.

This camera has an interchangeable lens mount and can accept both 120 and 220 films.

You can download the details in pdf format from here.

Disclaimer: I'm no way related to the seller and not endorsing any way his/her products

Handmade 35mm panoramic camera

A couple of weeks ago I found two handmade cameras offered by the ebay seller 'mn_2oox'. This particular camera accepts 35mm film and produces ultra long 24x108 mm negatives.

A brief feedback searching revealed that this seller has an excellent reputation of selling handmade/modified cameras. One can further query him to know if he has some new things to offer next.

I've saved the details of the camera in pdf format and you can download it from here.

Disclaimer: I'm no way related to the seller and not endorsing any way his/her products

Fetching handmade cameras from Ebay

I'm buying photographic items from Ebay for many years. Other than buying conventional items I also keep an watchful eye over novel gadgets which include handmade cameras. If you're lucky enough, some simple search phrases like 'handmade camera', 'homemade camera', 'camera + project', 'DIY camera', 'modified camera' etc can fetch you very interesting stuffs.

In my next posts I'll talk about two very novel handmade panoramic cameras I came across in ebay.

Panoramic film formats (2)

This picture gives you an idea of how a Horizon S3 Pro( I have one ) or a Fuji 617 or a 6x12 panoramic compares to normal sized negatives.

I thank Mr Lachlan Doig for kindly providing the picture. Mouse over the original picture to see the annotaions. For more panoramic pictures by Lachlan Doig click here.

Panoramic film formats (1)

In film based panoramic photography, a large number of formats exist.Both 35mm and medium format panoramic cameras offer a variety of aspect ratios.The common theme that underlies all these formats is the long, slender look of the slides, signifying the high length:width ratio of panoramic format.

One can very easily visually compare many of the available sizes from this Flickr photo.

This photo of different pano slides was taken and kindly provided by panoramaXL.

Click here to see the original pic and know to which camera the format belongs to.

Check also panoramaXL's blog for many more interesting topics on panoramic photography.