Introducing “Freiraum”
A new format of blog posts. It is dedicated to the idea of implementing experimental techniques into your normal photographic routine. This will broaden your view, open your mind to new concepts and ideas which ultimately enhance your work.
Lensless Panorama Photography
A wonderful handmade wooden camera
Autumn in Paris! Sounds like a great plan and it was indeed. I decided to leave my heavy Hasselblad at home and had a very small pocket size wooden pinhole camera with me. The Nopo Pan135 bestowed to be a fun tool for this late afternoon walk along the River Seine.
This really small but capable panoramic pinhole camera is manufactured by a small Spanish company and I bought mine a couple of years ago and only sporadically used it meanwhile. It certainly has its quirks and downsides but is also was lot of fun to shoot with. For those who are interested in some technical details, the focal length is 32mm and the pinhole diameter is 0.25mm which means an aperture of f/128. The camera uses 35mm film and exposes an area of 24x60mm. Needless to say that you need at least a small tripod for shooting as exposure times easily go from one second up to 30 second and maybe even beyond that depending on the light situation.
What I personally really like about this slightly unusual camera is the shutter release which is as simple as twisting the ring around the pinhole. This ring also offers a 52mm filter thread and therefore you can use color filters for black and white film or even a neutral density filter to have more control over exposure time.
For this photo walk I took an old expired Fuji Superia 400 color negative film. However it was processed in ECN-2 chemicals which is normally used for cinematic film like Kodak Vision 3. This service was a test run by the Silbersalz35 film lab in Stuttgart which they conducted last year. I was invited to give it a try and this film turned out to work perfectly in this combination.
I had a lot of fun shooting with this light weighted camera and it gave me a somewhat different view on the world as I normally see it when roaming the streets with my Hasselblad. It even attracted some attention of passerbies as they were curious to learn more about it. If any, the only downside of the camera is the winding mechanism which turned out to be a bit tricky. It is important that both knobs are turned simultaneously to properly advance the film. Also framing of the image was a bit difficult as you have only two lines engraved on the body to assist you with finding the right composition.
In the end I was quite happy with the images and how they turned out and I might take the Nopo Pan135 for some other walks around the cities in Europe for some more panoramic pinhole impressions.
Nopo Pan135 panoramic wooden pinhole | Fujfilm Super 400 | ECN-2
Paris, France October 2021