However, this third camera needed yet another type of film. It took me a while before getting around trying to stuff some regular film into this camera. To do so, I needed to saw off the top off a film canister because a regular canister is too high. Then I stuffed some folded cardboard in the top to serve as winding thingy, and some cardboard under the roll, to push it a bit up, so the frame counting lever falls properly into the sprocket holes. Some black tape went over the window in the back door. Then, in a changing bag, I pulled out all the film and put it into the camera. When you take a picture and advance the film, the exposed film gets pulled into the canister.
Well, all set and done, I shot a few test rolls. The results were, er, interesting. Lightleaks galore! The back door window clearly needed more tape. And maybe some tape around the door itself as well… Also, the pics are not too sharp. I think the loose film in the camera curls a bit, throwing off the focus. The second roll I shot took forever. After some time I decided to check (in the dark) if my roll wasn’t full. It turned out I handn’t properly loaded the film, so it wouldn’t advance. Oops. It was soon fixed though, and then it worked okay. Still unsharp, but by now I had thought of a cool trick: this camera is very well suited for microclicks.
Since the original film only had one sprocket hole per frame, you need to take a picture, advance, and then shoot four or five times with the lens covered (another cause of spectacular lightleaks) to advance enough. But if you only shoot and advance once, you can make endless panorama’s with a lot of overlap.
Using this camera is a bit of a hassle, but in a fun way. I’ll probably try this again.
