Category: Photography

Discovering the XPan Crop

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.

Recycling

Black and white image of recycling bins, North Dunedin
When care is taken in design, even utilitarian recycling bins look good

My resolutions are pretty prosaic and are largely recycled:

● Read more.

● Lose weight.

● Reduce time online.

● Be political.

● Learn something.

● Travel somewhere noteworthy.

● Be a more diligent photographer.

● Keep this blog.

Happy 2025, everyone.

The Light We Cannot See

Lindsay Creek, Dunedin Botanic Gardens

I’m getting a bit more interested in infrared photography and I have a little point and shoot I’ve installed CHDK on – a hack that allows it to shoot RAW – and I’m planning to make a hardware modification to it to turn it into a dedicated full spectrum camera.

In the meantime I have to satisfy myself with slow shutter speeds and a 720nm filter that is best rendered as black and white. Here’s an example from last year.

A Walk in the Park

The Winter Garden at Dunedin Botanic Gardens
View of the Edwardian Winter Garden taken from the Rose Garden, Dunedin Botanic Gardens

It was a glorious late Spring day in Dunedin today and I headed out to the Botanic Gardens to take a few photos. Mainly some test shots with my Pentax K2. I picked up a practically as new edition of the camera for a song recently. It’ll be turning 50 next year.

I haven’t developed the film yet – black and white. I think I overexposed the first few shots as it was Fomapan 400 and as you can see from the digital shot above it was a very bright day. I was shooting in aperture priority. Once I realised that, I stopped my lens down to the f/8-f/16 kind of range and started getting shots below 1/1000.

Anyway, lovely day, photos taken, blog entry completed.