My hands get all itchy when I’m bored! After a couple of rolls on the Holga Wide Pano (WPC) camera, I got a bit bored of having to lug along a tripod for shoots. So I thought ‘Hmm! If only the pano camera works like a normal Holga (ie. non pinhole) … how cool will that be?!’. Didn’t take me too much effort to see that the WPC and the normal Holga’s ‘body’ were of the same thickness (or perhaps very close). Aha!!! I could try do a transplant and move the normal Holga’s lens/shutter over to the WPC, and I might be able to shoot pano photos handheld! How cool will it be to be able to get 6×9 or 6×12 (the WPC offers these two options) photos without the pain of using a pinhole camera?
It took me just 5 minutes or less to do the transplant, but it was just a very rough job as I didn’t wanna glue the stuffs permanently (yet) in case it doesn’t work and I’ll need to make sure both cameras can still work as they should.
Here’s a photo of this Frankenstein I created this afternoon …
Looks crappy eh?
So does it work? Hell yeah! It works great! I was using it like a normal Holga and I could get it to focus fine (or at least okay … since the Holga ain’t suppose to be that perfect after all)!!!
That’s the good news.
Now for the bad … I screwed up! Okay, stop grinning! I know … I always screw up. 🙁 I totally forgot that when using the WPC, we are supposed to advance and shoot only on odd numbered frames (as the pano format takes up 2 frames)!!! So since I exposed the roll on every single frame, this means I end up with the entire roll of overlapping frames! Oh hell!
Had no choice but to make do with scanning the entire roll as a looooooooooooooooong pano image. Pretty hell having to cut the film strip, scan and stitch them in Photoshop but hey … at least I know the Frankenstein Holga works!
I’ll definitely burn another roll or two again next week after I get it nicely glued up and light sealed … yeah … this time advancing film the correct way 😛 Meanwhile … here’s the ultra long pano (might take a while to load too). My first time trying to embed a pano pic in my blog, so do leave me a comment should you not be able to view it.