Related: Holga WPC group on Flickr

Shikihan made this insane 6×17 "Limousine" pinhole camera out of a Holga! You can see two test shots made with it in Tokyo here and here on Flickr.

She’s made a bunch of other cool pinhole cameras (and makes great photos with them), check them out!

Dear MAGNAchromers,

Wow. The 4th issue is finally “in the can” and is available to download for free from our website www.magnachrom.com. Time for me to take a day off (or two) and then start the 5th issue.

Anyway, we have really been listening to your your ideas over the past few months. And as a result, this issue has been totally re-designed in order to allow us to better provide MAGNAchrom in alternate media in the future (such as CD-ROM, print-on-demand, etc). We have lots more planned in the near future and only need your continued support.

Featured in this issue
SOAPBOX: A Brotherhood of Photographers
HOT MODS: MP4 with Technika-style lensboards
4-SQUARE: Tim Myers
STUDENT WORK: The Royal College of Art
REVIEW: Shen-Hao HZX 45IIA
CENTERFOLD: Mike Stacey
FEATURE: Sandy King: Carbon Prints
CUSTOMIZE: A Homebrew 6×17 Camera
INTERVIEW: Robert Kresa
NEWS: New Stuff
COLLECTIBLES: Rolleiflex TLR
PROJECT: Working Class
PARTING SHOT: Guggenheim, Bilbao

We hope you enjoy the new "look" of MAGNAchrom — please let us know if you like the new direction we are taking. Again, we REALLY value your feedback — keep it coming! MAGNAchrom is a labor of love.

P.S. the next issue, the 5th, is all about night photography and we still have some "room" for a few additional supporting articles — please feel free to pmail me at editor “at” magnachrom “dot” com and I’ll try to fit your work in.

P.P.S the following issue, the 6th, will be all about hybrid photography — probably our most ambitious issue yet. Any of you who are comfortable mixing analog and digital processes should REALLY consider contributing to this issue. Pmail me as above.
J Michael Sullivan
Editor/Publisher, MAGNAchrom
www.magnachrom.com

MAGNAchrom is available as a free PDF download for registered users (which is also free).

Mac A. Cody writes:

On one of my robots, I wanted to place a camera that could observe everything around it. The camera did not have to have a high frame rate. It was not going to be used for motion capture or real-time autonomous driving. It did need to have a 360 degree field of view. Think in terms of the cameras on the Mars Viking landers of the 1970s.

PanoramaScanCam™ is my implementation of a panoramic camera implemented using the components of a flatbed scanner. This is not an original concept. Flatbed scanners have been used as cameras by a number of experimental photographers…

Check it out!

Via MAKE Blog

Home made Panoramic Jig. Using 1/8 Alum. Just finished it this morning. It weighs 12.3 Oz with the Manfrotto CR2 plate attached. Cost about 35$ for all the parts (I went with stainess where I could) and I have enough Alum. left over to make a second one. Now to go try it out!

Via MAKE Blog

Stitching software and digital cameras make panoramic photos far easier than ever before. However, to get the best results, you need a special tripod head. These can cost hundreds of dollars, but making your own isn’t that hard. Even better, it’s dirt cheap.

Read instructions at Worth1000

Via LifeHacker, with thanks to wabewalker

It all started on a long plane flight in the beginning of 2006. I was doodling in my Moleskine notebook and musing about pinhole cameras when and idea struck me. What if I made a camera that was panoramic and high capacity at the same time. I had been shooting with my 6×9 medium format pinhole (120 film) for a few weeks and was happy with the images but wished I could get more than eight shots a roll and have a wider field of view. What I thought was if I moved the pinhole closer to the film plane and rotated to aspect 90 degrees I could get dozens of images on a single roll of film and still get a pretty good sized negative. Turns out I can get about 30 images on a roll and even a quickly made pinhole will produce a satisfactory sharpness.

Check it out at Team Droid

Via the f295 Pinhole Photography Forum

According to this article in the British Journal of Photography,

The decision follows new EU regulations—known as ROHS approvals—which come into effect on 01 July, designed to cut back on hazardous waste.

The approvals state that new electrical equipment cannot contain lead, cadmium or many other hazardous materials.

This means that lead soldering can no longer be used in the cameras’ circuit boards. The use of non-lead designs are more complex and would necessitate a total redesign of the cameras.

…

He [Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen] predicted supplies would run out in the next two months, but promised that support would continue for another 10 years.

While I won’t say that their reason for pulling it is outright bullshit, I will say that it certainly smells like it. I could be wrong, but I fail to see why a solder change would necessitate a redesign at all: simply put lead-free solder in the wave solderer that assembles the circuit boards and that’s that. We’re talking about solder. It carries electricity between points A and B. We’re not talking about the banning of resistors here.

The article does go on to say that Hasselblad are working on a "tilt-shift solution" and that more information will be available at the Photonika trade show this September, so maybe it’s not all crap news after all.

Read article at the British Journal of Photography’s Web site

While I think it’s a damn shame, I’m not surprised, either. While I haven’t used the XPan II, I have and love the original. It’s built like a brick shithouse, the controls are perfectly laid out for me (except the panoramic/normal 24×36 selecter, which is a pain, but it should be considering what it does), has modern film loading, winds the entire roll out when it loads and rewinds exposed film into the cartridge (why the hell doesn’t every camera do this? If the back opens, I’d much rather lose blank film rather than frames I’ve already shot!), and has the best in-camera meter I’ve ever used.

But! The lenses, the lenses! Only three, slow, expensive lenses (the 30mm weighs in at a hefty US $3000). (30mm f/5.6 (slower with the required center filter), 45mm f/4, and 90mm f/4.) By Leica (yes, I’m going there) standards, the 45 and 90 are reasonably priced at $594 and $730, respectively (pricing from B&H). It seems that Hasselblad missed an opportunity to take a bite out of Leica’s ass with this system. I’m its perfect target market: I shoot film, dig manual focus rangefinders, want aperture priority AE, and belive that if I’m going to spend that kind of money, I should get post stone-age film loading and a shutter with accuracy of greater than 1/3 stop and would have happily bought faster lenses were they available. I think there are more of us out there.

And while I’m perfectly willing to push film to 128000, f/4 is still slow. Even putting aside the obscene price of the 30mm, the required center filter brings it down to almost f/11. I don’t think Hasselblad considered the possibility that anyone would want to use the camera indoors, which is a shame. Until I got into the Contax G2 system (which I love but wouldn’t have done had I had faster lenses to choose from!), it was my take-everywhere, joined-at-the-hip, disappeared-in-my-hands camera, and I loved it. Except the low light thing. (Well then why the hell did I get into the system in the first place? I inherited it.)

Anyway, I’m sad to see it go. It’s a great camera. Almost everyone I know who’s actually spent some time with one loves it. Bye bye, XPan!