Shooting Panoramic Film: XPan 24x65 and 6x17

Two strips, two families of cameras

There are two panoramic frames most film shooters end up with. The first is 24x65mm on ordinary 35mm film. The Hasselblad XPan brought it in 1998, built by Fuji, who sold the same camera in Japan as the TX-1. The XPan II and its twin, the TX-2, followed in 2003. Both bodies switch between a normal 24x36 frame and the 65mm wide one in the middle of a roll, which is a strange and lovely thing to be able to do.

You can also get 24x65 out of a Mamiya 7 II (or the original Mamiya 7) with the AD701 35mm panoramic adapter kit: a mask, a cassette holder, a take-up spool and a rewind crank. Mamiya's manual gives the picture area as 24mm by 65mm. It works. It is also fiddly, and once a 35mm roll is in, the camera is a panoramic camera until you rewind it.

The second frame is 6x17 on 120, roughly 56 by 168mm of film. The Fuji GX617 (1993, interchangeable 90, 105, 180 and 300mm lenses) and the Linhof Technorama 617 series are the cameras people mean. Neither has a meter. Neither is light.

How wide is wide, really

24x65 is a 2.71:1 frame and 6x17 is 3:1. That ratio is what trips up equivalent focal lengths, because the usual diagonal comparison undersells how much of the horizon you get.

Take the XPan 45mm f/4, the lens most people buy the camera with. By diagonal it behaves like a 28mm on full frame. By width it is closer to 25mm, and its horizontal angle of view is about 72 degrees. Vertically, though, it sees exactly what a 45mm sees on a 35mm frame, about 30 degrees, because the short side is the same 24mm. That is the trick of the format. You get a wide angle across and a normal lens up and down, so you can look straight at a street without the tilted verticals a real 24mm would give you.

The 30mm f/5.6 goes to roughly 95 degrees across, about a 17mm by width. The 90mm f/4 is around 40 degrees, close to a 50mm by width, and in practice it is the lens that makes the XPan feel like a portrait camera. On the Mamiya with the adapter, the 43mm lands near 74 degrees, nearly the same view as the XPan 45.

On 6x17 the numbers get silly. The GX617's 90mm covers about 86 degrees across, about 19mm by width, while its vertical view (35 degrees) matches a 38mm or 39mm on 35mm. The 105mm is around 77 degrees, the 180mm about 50, the 300mm about 31. I think the 180 is the most underrated of the four. It cuts a slice out of a landscape instead of swallowing all of it.

Composition advice, for what it is worth: put something in the middle third. A 3:1 frame with all the interest at the two ends reads as two pictures glued together.

Metering a scene that is mostly sky

Point an averaging meter at a beach with the horizon halfway up the frame and it sees a big bright band of sky, then a band of wet sand, and settles somewhere in between. The sand comes out a stop too dark. Turn ten degrees toward a low sun, which a 95 degree lens can't really avoid, and it gets worse.

The sky also changes from one end of the strip to the other. Late in the day, the half nearest the sun is clearly brighter than the half facing away, often by a stop or more, and you will see that gradient on a slide. Screw a polariser on a wide XPan lens and the effect turns into a dark smear across one part of the sky. I've binned more frames to that than to bad focus.

What works is a spot reading of the ground. Pick the thing the picture is about (the dunes, a stone wall, the shadow side of a barn) and put it where you want it on the Zone System scale, Zone V for sunlit grass is a fine start. Now spot the brightest sky that will end up in the frame and count. Portra shrugs off five or six stops between the two. Velvia does not: past roughly two and a half, you need a grad, a different hour, or a plan for a blank sky.

The XPan's own meter reads through the lens, so it sees any filter you fit. It is centre-weighted, though, and the manual describes its measuring area as about 20 by 30mm in the middle. On a frame 65mm long, both ends go unread. Fine for street work in even light. Not something I'd bet a sunset on.

Centre filters and what they cost

Light falls off toward the edge of any wide lens, and on these formats the edges are far from the middle. Run the cos fourth law on a GX617 with the 90mm and the extreme corners come out about two stops down before you count any mechanical vignetting. The XPan 30mm is worse, close to two and a half. A centre filter fixes this by being grey in the middle and clear at the rim, so you lose light where you have plenty to spare.

You pay for it in exposure, and with a hand meter you add the factor yourself. Hasselblad rates the XPan 45mm centre filter at 1 stop. The 30mm one is normally quoted at about 1.5 stops, and a few owners who measured theirs got nearer a factor of 3, call it 1.6. Fuji's filter for the GX617 90mm is a 2x, a single stop. People who have tested it say it only corrects around half of the corner falloff, so you hand over a stop of shutter speed and the corners are still a bit dark.

My view: the 30mm is the hard lens on an XPan, and it wants its filter nearly every time. Wide open at f/5.6 with the filter on, you are exposing as if at about f/9.5, and in shade with ISO 100 slide film that means a tripod. The 45mm is a different animal. Plenty of people leave its filter in the bag once they are at f/11. With the 617 it comes down to film. Colour negative falloff disappears in the scan; on a transparency it stays.

One trap. If the XPan's meter is doing the reading, the filter is already in its light path, so don't add the stop again. There is more on stacking factors in the filter factor glossary entry.

Frames per roll

An XPan gets about 21 panoramas from a 36-exposure roll. Many owners get 20, and it depends on the film and the body, so do not plan a trip around 21. Switching to 24x36 for a few frames changes the count, of course.

The GX617 gets four frames on a roll of 120. Four. It gets eight on 220, if you can still find 220. You will change film in the wind more than you ever have. You will also take fewer bad pictures, because nobody spends a quarter of a roll on a maybe.

Depth of field on a long frame

Depth of field depends on the circle of confusion you accept, and here the panoramic formats get interesting. The diagonal rule would give 24x65 a looser circle than 35mm, because the frame is longer. That is misleading. A panorama is enlarged like the 24x36 frame that shares its 24mm short side, only wider, and looked at from about the same distance. Hasselblad's own XPan lens data uses one depth of field table per lens for both gates.

In practice: an XPan 45mm at f/11 has a hyperfocal distance of roughly 6.4m with a 0.029mm circle, or about 5.6m on Hasselblad's slightly looser 0.033mm scale. The GX617 90mm at f/22, using the 6x9 value of about 0.067mm, focuses hyperfocally at around 5.6m. At f/32, nearer 3.9m. The 180mm is another story. Even at f/32 its hyperfocal point is about 15m, so near foreground and far mountains will not both be sharp, and stopping further brings diffraction you will see in a big print.

How Zone Light Meter handles panoramic formats

Version 1.4 adds 24x65 and 6x17 to the FMT format dial. In Gear mode, picking an XPan or XPan II (or a Fuji TX body) limits the dial to 35mm and 24x65 and starts on 24x65. A Mamiya 7 offers 6x7 and 24x65 and starts on 6x7. A GX617 locks the dial to 6x17. The quickest way to find them is the Panoramic tab in Equipment. It shows only the bodies above, plus any custom camera you saved as 24x65 or 6x17, and the lens list drops to XPan, Mamiya 7 and GX617 glass.

The viewfinder draws the real strip proportions and picks the phone's ultra-wide when the strip is wider than the main camera can show. If even the ultra-wide falls short, a note says how much of the width you are seeing. Tapping Flip Orientation and turning the phone sideways gets you more. Depth of field uses 0.029mm for 24x65 and 0.067mm for 6x17, as above. The details are on the panoramic formats feature page.