My First Shots with the Pan-Holga 360 – by Sonny Rosenberg

The Pan-Holga was created by the inventor Richard McCaleb around 2003, at least that’s when he sent it to Cory Armantrout who I just bought it from. I was compulsively perusing various kinds of cameras on E-bay when I stumbled upon the Pan-Holga, when I expressed an interest in it, Cory offered to sell it to me for half the listed price, needless to say I couldn’t resist!

The Pan-Holga, which I’ve re-named the Pan-Holga 360 to differentiate it from the current crop of 6×12 Holgas, is a 6×27 full 360° rotating 120 format Holga. The negatives are 11 inches long!

Unlike some panoramic cameras which swing the lens across the film plane, this camera essentially rotates the film and aperture around a pivot point. The camera is indeed quite lo-fi as there is a lot of banding induced by the somewhat jerky motion of the gears driven by the battery powered motor.

The exposure of the Holga-Pan 360 is fixed by the aperture, which is adjustable by changing the width of the aperture slit. It’s currently set to accommodate ISO 100 film. One would double the width of the slot for ISO 50 film, etc.

As soon as you flick the switch the Holga begins rotating and exposing film. To avoid making a panoramic selfie I had to follow the rotating camera around so as to stay out of the view of the lens.

The shots below are pretty boring subject matter wise, my front garden, my house and my neighbor’s house, but at least they give you an idea of what photos from the Holga-Pan look like. I’m including detail crops from each shot because at least on my little lap top screen a panorama of the native aspect ratio generated by the Holga-Pan 360 doesn’t display all that well.

Actually, I think that in the future I won’t normally use this camera to take the 360° panoramas it’s capable of, I’ll probably just do 180°s or 120°s so I don’t have to chop them up. I’m even entertaining thoughts of getting an archival printer that will accept rolls of paper. I’m thinking that I should be able to get decent size prints from the gigantic negatives this camera generates. Plus, I’m sure I’d sell a million prints at least, no?

The shots below were taken on Fuji Acros II 100 and developed in Cinestill Df96 monobath. They were inverted in Lightroom, but other than that and some cropping, were untreated. I realize that I’d get even more of the panoramic effect if I cropped the images tighter vertically, but I wanted to show what the photos straight out of the camera look like.

As alway, thanks for reading!

For more photographic oddities like this, check out my little blog The Daily Lumenbox.

Sonny Rosenberg is a semi-retired Ceramics teacher who lives in Reno Nevada with his wife and three cats.

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