Lomography are always full of surprises… They took the Sutton-type lens and plastic shutter from the awful LomoMod 1, and the 35mm back for their Belair camera, stuck a plastic cone-thing and part of a Belair camera body in between them, and *poof new panoramic camera!
Apologies, but I haven’t photographed the camera, so you’ll have to make do with Lomo’s store page about it.
I took the Hydrochrome Sutton’s panoramic Belair (hereafter… I haven’t decided what to call it yet, but “Hyrdochrome Sutton’s panoramic Belair won’t do) along on a walk along the trails by the Old Alton bridge in Argyle, TX, with my darling adorable wife one day in late December 2020. I shot it alongside the LC-W in half frame mode, the LC-A 120, some long expired 127 format Focal Color 100 in the Yashica-Mat 124, and… something else, I think.
I’m quite the camera-juggler at times.
Anyway. From one side of the little parking lot, you can scramble up a little embankment and check out the crushed bridge. And if you’re careful, you can score some nice flare from the liquid-filled Sutton-type lens.
The Old Alton Bridge is a groovy old bridge out in what I would call the middle of nowhere, and there are trails through the nearby woods along the Hickory Creek and down to Lake Lewisville. For whatever reason, the few benches, a sort of shelter thing, and a bunch of trees are just crushed with graffiti, so it must not really be the middle of nowhere.
We walked across the old bridge (not pictured) and a bit of the way down one side of the creek, where I took a picture of my darling wife to sort of check edge sharpness on the Sutton lens.
Eh. Not bad. Looks a bit similar to the Sprocket Rocket, and remind me to shoot them side by side soon.
If you load the camera in a darkbag, you might be able to stretch 12 frames out of a 36 exposure roll. I did, sorta…
If you look carefully, you’ll see that there’s some overlap in those last two. I did that sorta on purpose. I wanted to test out Affinity Photo’s auto-stitch mode. I’m in need of a new scanning solution here in 2021, and, well, if it works well-enough $50 isn’t much to spend, if it works…
And… Well, I dropped the $50, and it remains to be seen if another scanning system is in the works…
I’ll have more on the Hydrochrome Sutton’s panoramic Belair camera one day, and maybe some product shots and comments on the lens, but don’t hold your breath… I wasn’t going to buy one, but saw that it came with a f/168 pinhole plate (the lens uses those slide-in apertures, like on several of Lomo’s fancy brass lenses). After finishing this roll successfully, mostly with the f/16 plate, I stuck the pinhole plate in, attached a cable release, and got to town… but didn’t push the plunger in far enough to actually open the shutter, so didn’t expose any photographs. smh.
I’ve had a load of photographic failures in the recent past. There was a time when I seemed to know what I was doing and how I was doing it… lately, it’s been just stumbling around in dark. Oh well. At least I’ve found another spot to go and photograph, even if I don’t get any pictures out of it…
