Widescreen

Here are some pictures from my wonderfully crappy Miranda Solo Panoramic plastic camera.

It is about as simple as they come – one shutter speed and one aperture. The lens is fairly wide, I would guess about 20mm (you can see some distortion in the pictures it makes) and inside about half the negative is masked off with a bit of plastic to give it the panoramic aspect ratio. One improvement would be to make this mask removable so you can choose whether to just have a wide angle 35mm or a ‘panoramic’ camera. There are quite a few very similar camera about and if you like the look then I would not get hung up on theMiranda Solo thing, just get any focus free 35mm panoramic film camera you can find from ebay.

Anyway I am a bit obsessed by this at the moment and take it with me pretty much everywhere I go. I love the format and I love that the only controls on it are the shutter button and the film advance, it really reduces photography to whats important which is just to put a frame around the world and show people what you see.

I also love the grainy little negatives it produces and how they looked printed with the heavy black border. And I love the price – you can get them (or similar, wouldnt get hung up on the make) for about £2, less than the cost of the roll of film! Having said all that I would kill for an XPan!

UPDATE: I now have a second panoramic camera that I bought with a few ideas for modifying it. I put a roll of expired film through it and it also takes nice pics:

ANOTHER UPDATE: here are some more I like from the second pan cam…

YET MORE:

EDIT:

I have added yet more colour ones here.

[EDIT yet again] So I now also have a Practika CM1000 and have put one roll of film through it. This has a sharper lens, is autofocus and has 3 (yes 3!) shutter speeds so the exposures should be better. It only has a 28mm lens though so thats a slight downside. Anyway here are some images from the first film from this camera: