a panoramic road trip

a new year's eve road trip
five days
1500km kastoria - vrontero (prespes) - tsepelovo (zagorochoria)
with various stops on the road, lots of animals, a few people, huge bodies of water, boatloads of cold and the worst possible weather
sunshine & clear skies and this camera can't shoot against the sun

all images shot with the horizon 202 russian panoramic camera on ilford pan 400 film.

panoramic endeavors

In December 2017, I was invited by the photography team of Filippiada to make a visit and do a presentation of my photographic work. I took this as a chance to shoot the wonderful scenery of Epirus, notably the rainy landscapes around Amvrakikos Gulf. I only had two early mornings to roam around, and the moody weather suited the panoramic Horizon 202 perfectly. This is one of my favourite "fun" cameras, and I've written an article for this camera in Photographos magazine, detailing its functions and quirks (it's in greek). The film is Ilford Pan 400 (pushed to 1600), developed in Kodak D-76 and scanned with the Pakon F-135 scanner. Out of two films (22 exposures per film), I kept a handful of images.

...and this is the old russian princess; she has a light-leak condition in direct sunlight but she's a darling in cloudy weather.

panoramic endeavors

...five years after I got my hands on the Vivitar PN2011 and shot just one film with it, I decided to take it out for a spin one more time. I spent half a month between April and May 2016 doing location scouting for a commercial, so I had enough incentive (and lots of landscapes) to shoot some extra frames for fun. this time I used a different film: Arista Edu Ultra 400, which is actually a rebadged Fomapan 400 and it doesn't leave the best impressions, especially when compared to Kodak Tri-X or something. I souped it in Kodak T-Max developer, 1:4 dilution, for 7:30 minutes @ 20c, and scanned the film with the greatest 35mm film scanner of all, the Pakon F-135. so, a mediocre film paired up with a plastic panoramic camera which will inevitably over-expose it by a couple (or more) stops. let's see.

(this image is me, standing on a rock in the middle of a u-turn, waiting for a car to come by. the image was shot by miss Vicky)

...and here is this little 15 bucks of a camera:

panoramic endeavors

...so, some months ago I came across another cheap plastic toy camera, named vivitar pn2011. it is nothing special, sporting a 28mm/f8 lens and a fixed shutter speed of ~1/125 sec, but it has a "panoramic" mode which, when selected, crops the 35mm frame to a panoramic aspect. I thought "what the hell, it's only 15$", so I got it.

when it arrived, I loaded it up with a roll of long-expired agfa apx 100 and took a couple of weeks to finish 24 exposures (I can never finish a roll on time, heh). developed the film, scanned it and then... forgot about it... until yesterday: as I was looking through my files to compile a new portfolio on urban landscapes, I came across this film, so I decided to clean up some frames and put them on my blog. On to the images now.

...first I took this little camera on a walking tour around marousi: kifissias avenue, agios thomas and the sideroads of attiki odos. didn't give a lot of thought to the stuff I was photographing, really, since I was trying to finish a roll as soon as possible and see the resulting images.

...and then we went to rafina, to explore the spring seaside - a lot of good images were waiting for me there but I was preoccupied with the lomographic society's upcoming "time machine" exhibition and I was trying to get the best out of my holga - the resulting image was a good compensation.

...aaaand, that's all folks. I don't think I'll keep this one, it's very similar (but less wide angle) to my vivitar ultra wide & slim, and I wasn't really impressed with the panoramic mode. It crops a lot of film and the remaining film area is not enough for a decent scan and big enough prints. I'd prefer to throw some hundred euros in the direction of a 6x9 medium format camera than cope with cropped 35mm film.