A few months ago, after a bit of thinking, I bought a 3d printer. I say, “after a bit of thinking” because I did not want to spend my free time still in front of a monitor to design stuff. But, in the end, I gave in and went for a used/cheap 3d printer in order to see if it would be interesting for me. After a few months I got bored of tweaking and adjusting the old printer and I went for a brand new one… and everything changed.
I started making pinhole cameras for the same reason I imagine many people do – because I could! They are deceptively simple objects – after all it’s just a box with a hole in it, right! Regardless, they are capable of producing beautifully complex images.
In my early experiments I used what I could find around me – matchboxes, bits of ducting and even felted sheep’s wool. Alongside this, and armed with my trusty Ondu 135, I was learning how to produce the kind of images I wanted using pinhole cameras. I began to understand that I wanted more flexibility to shape my camera to my ideas.
After a brief diversion into creating an underwater pinhole camera (that’s another story) I set to work designing a camera which could change and adapt to new ideas.
The Cameradactyl OG is a camera I have been meaning to write about since, well, ages ago (sorry Ethan). It’s also my first large format camera review, and indeed the first large format camera review on 35mmc. Though thanks, at least in part to this experience, it won’t be the last!
It was Day 6 of COVID-19 isolation, I was feeling more and more restless. Being one of the lucky ones, I could still work from home, but my mind was distracted by the barrage of sad news. I needed a project, a welcomed point of focus. Luckily for me, Wilco Jensen from Hassyparts posted his latest project on a Facebook group for film camera users. He made a mechanical XPan from a Nikon FE body with a 47mm Schneider lens on a simple helicoid. This project immediately got my gears spinning… didn’t I have a couple of broken FEs sitting in my parts camera bin?
I’m Ethan, I make cameras at Cameradactyl.com. A few months back I finished the initial prototypes for a new camera, the Brancopan, which is a 35mm panoramic camera that takes Mamiya press lenses. For this article, I wanted to put together a bit of a preview, as well as showing some pictures I’ve taken with the camera. I’ve had a working version of the Brancopan since this summer, and I’ve beat it around quite a bit, shot about a hundred rolls over three countries. I only have about 40 rolls scanned so far.
