The Hasselblad Xpan is a very interesting 35mm film camera. It was a joint venture with Fujifilm, who actually made both the camera body and the three lenses, and sold their versions as the Fujifilm TX. The camera was manufactured, in two versions, between 1998 and 2006, and discontinued because some materials were no longer allowed in the electronics, and the market for film cameras was shrinking. The camera is dual format – standard 36x24mm or panoramic 65x24mm, which can be randomly mixed. The standard lens is 45mm focal length, which gives a horizontal field-of-view for the panoramic frame that is equivalent to a 24mm lens with a conventional 36x24mm frame. It is in effect a medium format camera with a 65x44mm frame size cropped to 65x24mm to suit the width of 35mm film.
The Xpan was expensive when new, and is still expensive second-hand. Hasselblad list the Xpan on their repair page, but the combination of motor drive, electronic components that have not been manufactured for nearly 20 years, and ageing plastic parts, suggests that the camera might not be repairable. Buying one could be an expensive mistake.
This led me to look at ways of using a digital camera to emulate the Xpan panoramas. The obvious way to emulate a Hasselblad is to use another Hasselblad, the X1D, and a 30mm lens, as this has an Xpan crop built-in. This is a very expensive option, so was ruled out.
The second alternative is to make a panorama with a 50mm lens on a full-frame camera. Two 50mm frames side-by-side give a 72x24mm image, so a little bit of cropping gives 65x24mm. Take three photographs with a 50% overlap and merge them. This can obviously be done with any full-frame camera. With care, the three images can be taken handheld. I have tripods and a Nodal Ninja panorama head, but carrying them around takes away the pleasure of wandering around with a camera, so I never carry a tripod. To do it handheld, make sure there is nothing close to the camera (to avoid parallax problems); set focus, sensitivity, aperture and shutter speed all to manual; and use the artificial horizon in the viewfinder to keep the camera level. Modern panorama software can produce an extremely good image with handheld photos.
The third alternative is simpler. The Leica Q2 has a 28mm lens with a very high resolution sensor, and includes frame lines for 35, 50 and 75mm crops. The 50mm frame line gives the correct height for the Xpan crop, and the full width of the 28mm lens gives the required width. Compose the photograph using the 50mm frame line to indicate the top and bottom of the image, and the edges of the viewfinder to indicate the horizontal extent. Import the photograph (into CaptureOne Pro in my case) and apply a 65×24 crop, giving a 27 megapixel Xpan image.
I have cheated a bit, and used the same 28mm, 47 megapixel image to produce all of these examples. I didn’t align the three 50mm crops accurately, so the merged panorama is genuine.
The image is of Castlerigg Stone Circle, near Keswick.
