Recently I came across a few videos concerning the Hasselblad XPAN - a one of a kind camera that takes panoramic style ratio photos natively on 35mm film. Now as soon as i discovered it I thought " I need this in my life", then i checked the price and I would have to not buy another camera lens for the next 67 years to afford one.
So how what did i do ? Well its no secret i just cropped some landscape shots into a similar ratio to that of what comes out of the XPAN. Whilst granted my images firstly don't have the film aesthetic and secondly aren't the exact correct ratio, i think i still managed to feel nearly the same way looking back at these as i did seeing the shots that came out of the Hasselblad.
This revealed to me that it wasn't the camera itself i craved but rather this new way of composing that i had never thought of before, some thing that whilst natively being restrictive through cropping seemed to allow me to tell a story in the way it showed a wider image. Portraits gained more context and landscapes gained a linear storytelling effect to them allowing the viewers eye to be drawn left to right or vice versa.
Of course this way of shooting does come with its downsides, You often have to chop off the sky , and if points of interest are too far apart from the bottom of your image to the top then you will have to sacrifice one of them to achieve the cinematic look. Portrait rotation also is difficult to wrestle with, you can do a really nice focus on the eyes with this crop or on certain aspects of the face. However for a grungy street photography scene it would cut out too much.
This kind of crop may not work on Instagram, but not all media is meant to be consumed on there despite what we may have previously thought. On a wide screen it provides an angle of view which was not accessible to us before and forces us to look at certain images in a different way. Considering linearity and the relationships between subject and the empty space around them.
