Xpan on the Cheap

Some recent articles on 35mmc and elsewhere brought to my attention the marvels of the Hasselblad Xpan, also sold as the Fujifilm TX-1. It can expose a frame of 65 x 24mm on 35mm film, which is slightly less than two whole ‘normal’ frames of 36 x 24mm, and the aspect ratio is 2.74:1 which is even wider than Cinemascope, which varied between 2.35:1 and 2.66:1.

The thing fans emphasise about the Xpan/TX-1 is that the panoramic aspect ratio helps us to adjust our mental perspective to see the world in a way that is perhaps closer to how we actually view it with ‘both eyes open’. I have to admit to being intrigued by this concept, while at the same time not the least bit interested in forking out the ludicrous amounts of money that these exotic cameras sell for these days.

So naturally I started thinking about workarounds. Stitching two or more images made with more affordable cameras that shoot 3:2, 4:3 or even square formats is an option but requires a static subject, distortion-free lens and, if you are going to do it properly, rotating the camera around the nodal point of the lens.

While cropping a 35mm frame doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, cropping a 6x6cm or 9x6cm (or larger) original does, despite the obvious ‘wastage’ of film (I waste plenty of film anyway, so no big deal really). This approach appeals because I already have cameras with good lenses that produce these image sizes. As it happens, the Mamiya 6MF that I acquired 25 years ago (which I must acknowledge has also since become absurdly expensive) even has a panoramic adapter that allows you to shoot 35mm film, with an image size of 54x24mm, giving an aspect ratio of 2.25:1. Only 11mm less wide than the Xpan/TX-1 images. The Mamiya’s viewfinder has framelines for this option. But I have never used it and may or may not get around to trying it out. I’m more comfortable having the whole frame to work with and the option to crop later, if necessary. With 9×6 cameras, cropping to the 2.74:1 aspect ratio using the whole frame width produces an 83 x 30.3mm image.

So in this post I’m presenting some 9×6 and 6×6 film scans from my archive that I’ve cropped to either 2.74:1 or 2.35:1 (the ‘narrowest’ of the Cinemascope formats) just to see how they look. I was pleasantly surprised by many of them and am interested to know what others think. I do like the panoramic format, but I guess I’ve just got commitment issues (I know, the Xpan/TX-1 does let you shoot 3:2 if you want, but that doesn’t really solve the problem for me).

The featured image is from northern Vietnam, made with the Mamiya 6MF and 50mm lens. Fuji transparency film. Cropped at 2.35:1.

While I quite like most of these panorama crops (wouldn’t post them if I didn’t), plenty of the above images also work fine (for me) in their original (often square) format, or in some cases cropped to other common formats including 3:2, 4:3, 5:4 and even 7:6.
Thanks for reading.

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