Do you like the wide panoramic style of shooting? Do you like to shoot on large format cameras? Are you a bit of a masochist? If you answered yes to the first two the third is almost certainly a yes as well 😉 I am a massive fanboy of wide panoramic shooting. I have often thought about getting a Fuji 6x17cm until I come to my senses about spending that kind of money on a hyper-specialized camera I’d shoot once or twice a year. I do own a 4×5 view camera, a Linhof Technika III mk V with a graflock back and the Horseman 6x12cm roll film adapter was always on my radar. These units tend to be spendy fetching north of $700 on Ebay and at camera shows like PhotoFair.
Back in September at the PhotoFair in Portland, OR, I managed to get my hands on a nice Horseman 6x12cm roll film adapter and have taken it out a few times since. In the past I would load a full 4×5 sheet of film in a holder and then crop the image to the format I wanted. This offers some creativity as to the image ratio but also requires shooting an entire 4×5 sheet to get what typically was 4-6cm x 12cm. The roll film adapter allows you to load 120 film in the adapter and shoot 6, 6x12cm images on the roll. No pesky sheet film holders, loading in the dark, unloading in the dark, yada, yada. Nope, just the glorious convenience of shooting 120 roll film. But unlike traditional 120 formats like 6×4.5cm, 6×6 cm, 6x7cm or 6x9cm you get to use the full width of the 4×5 cameras coverage. You end up with a pleasing 2:1 aspect ratio that generally prints well, frames well, and doesn’t over play the wide format look.
I do a lot of cityscapes and some landscapes as well and the 6x12cm format is well suited to the task. Horseman has always made nice quality products that were expensive but not out of reach like Sinar, Linhof, and a few others were back in the day. This Horseman roll adapter is well made, has good flat film handling, solid and reliable registration, and is fairly lightweight. Now I only have a few images through the adapter and I only had Ilford XP2 which is a C41 based B/W film. But I got a few images to show the image format and how it plays into landscape and cityscape images. I’ll be using this again in the springtime with HP5 or FP4 and I suspect the images will be better.
I have been known to trim my Vancouver USA skyline panoramas out to 4:1 but that is mostly due to Vancouver’s shorter high-rise buildings spread across a long waterfront. Taking the rig across the river to Portland would yield images in this format with a little more vertical interest as they have substantially taller high-rises in the Rose City. But in either case the 2:1 ratio is pleasing and still looks like a photograph rather than a constructed image.
2:1 is also becoming very popular in Hollywood for filmmaking and it seems the allure is just a tasty when the picture is moving. Below I have a few images I made before the holidays. As I mentioned above these were all on Ilford XP2 and I used a copy stand and my EOS R5 to digitize them for this post. This is not ideal but it worked well enough to try out the new gadget in my large format kit.
'Couv' Camera 