Typically, if you’re shooting 35 mm film, you’re using it in an old point-and-shoot or maybe a nice SLR. You might even make some sizeable prints if you take a particularly good shot. But you can get altogether weirder with 35 mm if you like, as [Socialmocracy] demonstrates with his “extreme sprocket hole photography” project (via Petapixel).
The concept is simple enough. [Socialmocracy] wanted to expose four entire rolls of 35 mm film all at the same time in one single shot. To be absolutely clear, we’re not talking about exposing a frame on each of four rolls at once. We’re talking about a single exposure covering the entire length of all four films, stacked one on top of the other.
To achieve this, an old-school Cirkut No.6 Outfit camera was pressed into service. It’s a large format camera, originally intended for shooting panoramas. As the camera rotated around under the drive of a clockwork motor, it would spool out more film to capture an image.
[Socialmocracy] outfitted the 100-year-old camera with a custom 3D-printed spool that could handle four rolls of film at once, rather than its usual wide single sheet of large format film. This let the camera shoot its characteristic panoramas, albeit spread out over multiple rolls of film, covering the sprocket holes and all. Hence the name—”extreme sprocket hole photography.”
It’s a neat build, and one that lets [Socialmocracy] use more readily available film to shoot fun panoramas with this old rig. We’ve featured some other great film camera hacks over the years, too, like this self-pack Polaroid-style film. Video after the break.
[Thanks to naMretupmoC for the tip!]
As a young kid I remember seeing some 60 to 90 cm long photographs (two to three feet), that were taken sometime after 1900, usually taken of all the students and teachers of an entire school standing outside the main entrance of the building. One thing that always stuck in my head was that some of the students/teachers on the right hand side of the photo would also appear on the left hand side of the photo. And I always assumed that it was either identical twins or the photos took so long to take that some of the students/teachers just had enough time to run behind the the photographer and appear in the photo twice.
I often wondered what the camera was, so now I know that it was taken with one of the many Cirkut (rotating panoramic) cameras. Thanks!
This was the style of camera that took our school photo, before the trend in the late 60s to switch to individual colour photographs. The photographer, whose name escapes me after so many decades, had two assistants preventing the dash which was obviously a thing, given some of the historic framed copies on the wall of the old school! As a member of the school photography club I always wnated to see the printing equipment but never did get the opportunity, it must have been way more impressive than our gnome enlarger (or possibly elf, I really can’t remember).
There was a similar idea a while ago. Someone made a rotating camera from a scanner. It was posted here on hackaday. Can’t find it now.
Found it! https://hackaday.com/2009/06/09/130-megapixel-scanner-camera/
Thanks! Short and sweet article shame the link is dead now and squatted.
It must be the oldest comment thread I’ve ever responded to! Nearly 16 years old!
The link is actually available on the internet archive. (just change ww38 to www). And it goes to japanese website, which is actually still alive)
The panoramic picture concept reminds me of QuickTime VR from the 90s.
Back in the day, 360° photo tours were a thing. Think of Myst, if you like.
You had rooms in which you could look sideways with your mouse.
There are sampler CD-ROMs of it at Internet archive, I think.
A game, “The Museum of Anything Goes”, also has rooms to explore, I think.
Anyway, the basic concept also worked for websites.
You could navigate room by room, exploring buildings and locations.
Schools had used this, I think, for example.
The artist Sigune Hamann has been shooting single shots on a whole 35mm film strip while capturing an event, i.e. over several seconds or minutes. Some of her work: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/14970/
i would live to work with a circut camera. i “only” have a roundshot 28/220 now shooting on 120 film and i love it! https://flic.kr/p/2ozLSdE