La educación moderna y el origami

Holga makes a panorama camera?!!! What?! Where?!! Well, actually no, they don’t. But you can make your Holga take ‘panorama’ pictures! We have outlined various techniques below, as attempted by toycamera.com members Melisa Taylor and Skorj.

First try by Melisa…

I was in New Orleans taking tons of pictures with my Holga and my Diana when I was inspired to try something new. I had previously seen a ‘Holga Panorama’ online, but it was 3 different scenes joined…When I got to New Orleans and saw how all the buildings are ‘joined’ together, and all the life and art on the streets, I knew I wanted to give this a go. The first thing I had to figure out was how I was going to make the picture ‘join’ together in exposure. On a previous roll, I watched the arrow on the advance knob (see image 1), at the same time I watched the numbers in the red window. I had determined that from one number to the next, it was one complete turn of the advance knob and a couple clicks between each number. During all of this, make sure your lens is always at the same distance and ‘aperture’ to keep the image consistent.

I took the first picture, and made sure to step sideways without changing my distance to the subject and made sure the ground was still even (now dubbed “The Ambrosia Shuffle” - see figure 4 below). Then I got to the next section and took the next picture, repeating the steps I took four exposures total (actually five, but that one had to be cut off because the ground level and the angle changed). When I was done, I had 4 joined and slightly overlapped exposures. (see image- “French Market Place”).

I found this to be a very simple way to do it and was very pleased to see that my first try had been so successful!

Skorj’s try...

It never occurred to me to walk sideways when taking my panoramas. After seeing Melisa’s fantastic work, I grabbed my Holga and stood in the one spot. Pivoting from frame-left to -right, where I was standing, exposing each frame in turn.

After a few attempts I have arrived at the following exposure technique. In summary, it places four exposures in the space of three normal frames.

Figure 1 shows the normal non-panorama exposure sequence, measured by conventional use of the film-back counter in the little red window. Holga 120 set as 6x6.

Figure 2 is an attempt to show how four exposures are squeezed into the space previously used by three normal exposures. I have offset the exposures vertically to show the overlap clearly. Normally these run horizontal as in Figure 1. The results of this technique should be clearly visible in this study of Tokyo Bay’s ‘Rainbow Bridge’:

By under-cranking, it is easy to achieve an accurate amount of overlap. How to measure the under-cranking too is relatively easy. My technique involves remembering the position of the wind knob’s direction arrow.

Using the drawing at right (Figure 3 - supposed to look like a Holga 120), let’s assume Exposure One has just been taken, and your wind direction arrow is in position ‘A’. To overlap, turn the wind direction arrow so that the arrow head is positioned at point ‘B’ - the point previously occupied by the tail of the arrow-head.

You are now ready to make Exposure Two. Repeat as necessary.

There is nothing stopping you from filling an entire 220 like this. Using my technique it would be pretty boring as you would be going around & around on the same spot for 32 exposures onto a 24 exposure roll.

Using Melisa’s technique, you could walk a whole street and capture a vast piece of art. Crazies here in Japan use real panorama cameras to take photographs of whole trains like this.

Framing-Overlap...

Remember too you will need to decide how much subject is required in each exposure. I call

Figure 1: Normal exposure sequence Figure 2: Panorama exposure sequence

“Rainbow Bridge” by Skorj

this the ‘framing-overlap’, and varying this produces the greatest variation in your finished results.

Framing-overlap (red segment marked ‘f’ on Figures 4, and 5 below) results in the same part of the subject being exposed to the film twice - once on the right-hand-side of the first exposure, and once on the left-hand-side of the second exposure. No framing-overlap means no part of your subject appears anywhere more than once.

The ‘Rainbow Bridge’ sequence above was made with very little framing-overlap. ‘Shibuya Crossing’ below was made with lots of framing-overlap. The resulting difference should be obvious:

Skorj Summary...

Four-into-three, from frame-left to -right is a good start for conceptualizing the technical process of getting the images into the film. Varying this concept; measuring differently, and changing your framing-overlap will all result in changes in the finished product. I’ll be shopping my Shibuya Crossing around to try and see the print lab results too. Watch the Forums for results.

Another Technique...

[Ambrosia] This technique has not been fully tested by me or Skorj, yet. I have tried it, but haven’t gotten the results back yet (see forum for updates). A friend of mine (goes by the name “Spacenuke”) tried this out and got good results.

Shoot the Holga set up for 6x6 images, but change the frame counter window set for shooting 6x4.5 images (move the slider to

show ‘16’ instead of ‘12’) , thus doing the overlap without having to think too much about it. It will automatically overlap for you. You can even set the slider in between ‘12’ and ‘16’ , for ease of switching back to take a ‘normal’ exposure in between panoramas.

Technique Summary...

There are many ways to do this depending on what end product you want. When doing “Shibuya Crossing” by Skorj

Figure 4: “The Ambrosia Shuffle”

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY

MELISA “AMBROSIA” TAYLOR