I think I’ve found a format that I really like: XPan ratio panoramas in black and white.
It started with trying out a secondhand lens: the Pentax 15mm f/4. Which on an APSC camera like my Pentax K3 mark iii Monochrome is pleasingly wide. So I made my way down to the Dunedin Botanic Gardens and took this shot of the Winter Gardens there. I often take photos around there. I could never get the whole thing in frame before, but with such a wide lens I got a great shot dead on.
The pitfall was that there was a lot of stuff in the shot I thought didn’t really help and Lightroom’s widest preset crop, 16:9, didn’t really crop out enough. I wanted a standard panoramic crop ratio and I discovered the XPan ratio. XPan was a panoramic film camera developed in a joint venture between Hasselblad and Fujifilm and
I was very pleased with the result.
This made me want to start composing more of my shots using that ratio, but the trouble is my camera only shoots in 3:2. I know some Lumix cameras offer the ratio as a native option, but I’ve got no plans to buy any more gear for a long time yet.
It turns out one of the viewfinder grids in the K3iii, while not being bang-on the ratio, is close enough for composing an image with the crop in mind. By composing in the middle two rows, I can get some great panoramas.
The images themselves end up being 14 megapixels after cropping, so are still very usable.
This last one was taken with a more conventional 35mm lens.
I have a feeling I’m going to be using this crop a lot.