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Thousands for an XPAN crop or try it out with this
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Thousands for an XPAN crop or try it out with this

Why I wanted the Hasselblad XPan look badly enough to build a camera app for it, and what shooting 65:24 actually feels like on a phone.

The XPan look is having a moment. Call the ratio 65:24 or 2.7:1 — either way it’s that long, narrow frame the Hasselblad XPan made famous. Used bodies still trade for thousands. I’m not paying that.

So I built FilmFrame instead. The repo is open now. If you have a Pixel (10-ish) and you want to shoot panoramas like an XPAN, clone it.

Image of the beach next to the Edmonds-Kingston ferry at golden hour
Image of the beach next to the Edmonds-Kingston ferry at golden hour

Why XPan, specifically

XPan if you don’t know is a format that was specifically made by Fuji and Hasselblad to capture wide angle images. The panoramic view brings a different perspective and back then, being able to capture using 35mm films made it a very attractive option. Current cameras with this crop like the Fuji X100RF go for $5K plus and a good original XPan sells for about the same on the used market. I like my cameras and manual photography but I’m not quite ready to drop that yet. I could justify dropping that on a computer but harder when my job isn’t photography.

Elk at the Zoo
Elk at the Zoo

What I shoot with it

I shoot a lot of walks on the beach, closer quarter stuff with my kids (panoramic stuff frames things differently), experimentally use it since that width just is so wild.

Cherry blossom at UW Quad
Cherry blossom at UW Quad

The film stock thing

The LUTS and film sims I’m less into to be honest, but I really like the Eterna and the PXL 2 HDR clone that I made. More importantly, make sure to use the widest lens you got!

Rocks at the beach.  Perspective is also fun to play with using a long crop.
Rocks at the beach. Perspective is also fun to play with using a long crop.

Try it

FilmFrame viewfinder showing the XPan letterbox overlay, manual controls, and live LUT preview
FilmFrame viewfinder showing the XPan letterbox overlay, manual controls, and live LUT preview

The whole thing is on GitHub. Pixel only for now. If you build it and shoot something good, I’d love to see it. If you trust enough, you can also grab the debug enabled APK release here too.



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