Fuji TX-1 (xpan)

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Well, it's the shittiest part of the week again. Time to stop my drinking, gambling, smoking, and whoring to make a video that no one's gonna watch because the only thing anyone gives a hippo's ass about is, you know, Mudang. Right, so now that everyone is gone to find something more interesting, here it is. My mediocre ex-pan review followed by me listing off my reasons for why I'm gonna sell it. Or, I don't know, maybe smash it with a hammer. Good lord, that'd be satisfying. The Hasselblad X-Pan, or the Fuji TX-1, it's the same thing, is a holy grail camera for a lot of photographers because it shoots widescreen cinematic images, otherwise publicized as panorama photos. But not like that shitty pano setting on point and shoots that just crops down. The TX-1 shoots an image that is twice the size of full frame, therefore technically making it medium format. But it does it all in this, you know, small form titanium rangefinder body. Honestly, looking back, this was kind of a crazy undertaking by Hasselblad and Fuji, and I'm a little surprised any supervisor okayed it. Anyway, pretty cool, right? It's the only camera that kind of does this. Does it linearly, at least I should say. Well, let me ruin it a bit further for you and show you some eBay prices on these. Don't forget to dramatically clutch your pearls and let out an audible gasp from the next room over. And yeah, you can probably just forget about owning the follow-up camera, unless you're like the rich ass emperor of some nation through hopefully not too many war crimes. I managed to pick up a mine about four years ago for the heavily discounted price of $2,000 because it has this one fatal flaw. This beauty mark on the top plate. Oh no, how will I ever shoot this ever again? Anyway, even at the time, it was still a pretty pricey camera. Though acquiring this camera was a bit of a dream come true for me. Lately in the past year, I've kind of been having some thoughts about it that have led me to not really pick it up so much and go out and shoot with it. But before we get into all that, let's pick it up and go shoot with it. With Caleb and my trusty Indiana Jones hat that definitely makes me more intelligent. Uh, I guess I need film. I loaded up the TX1 with some Ektachrome. Don't be alarmed when you load this f***er up and it does its, you know, shimmy and whine at you like a huge baby. Just be glad this thing is still less expensive than a real baby and be on your way. Regardless, this camera actually will unspool your entire roll of film when you first load it and then slowly spool it back in as you go about shooting it. It's a feature that not many cameras have, but it kind of helps you protect the photos that you've already taken. Not that you'll really be happy with them anyway. Sounds like a dying cat. I don't know if I'm in focus. There's a shot here, especially with the sun coming out. Let's do it. Underexposed. Because I'm at 1,000. F11 1 60th. Oh yeah, that'll look good. So like I said before, this camera is a rangefinder, which means when you look through the viewfinder here, you're not actually seeing through the lens. The frame lines are just giving you kind of an approximation of what you're going to get. And of course, yeah, because it is a rangefinder, you need to overlap the central ghost images on whatever you want to be in focus. It's a great system, but yeah, it definitely takes some time to get used to if you've never used a rangefinder before. If you're feeling like a homemade stout, aka hella crafty, the rangefinder is also somewhat easy to align. My camera was kind of sitting around on the shelf for a while. It's like a personal trophy to let other photographers know that I don't give a sh** about Pano, and I'm happy to set money ablaze just like the Joker. And when I picked it up, I noticed that the vertical alignment was kind of jacked up. So I followed a quick tutorial on YouTube and got it back up and running in like five minutes before I had to leave and go shoot this stupid f****** video. That's cool. I wonder if the shot is better from a higher angle up there. Cool. Shooting with this camera can be about as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. It does have some automatic functions like auto ISO through DX code readers, and it even has an automatic shutter speed function. This camera does not have autofocus or auto aperture, and the shutter speeds range from about 8 seconds to 1 1,000th of a second. I do believe the bold mode is pretty limited to about 30 seconds on most models. This is of course due to overheating. Some X-Pan 1s have an extended length to like six minutes, but when they produced the X-Pan 2, it was extended even further to nine minutes. You can tell the long exposure is up when your camera starts to produce smoke. Oh, that's kind of cool. Is this a shot? A little similar to what I just shot. Over here, you have a exposure compensation, but you can also set the ISO manually up here up front in case you want to give your, you know, photo friends a mini heart attack by setting E100 to 400 ISO, but with plus two compensation. On the other side, up top here is off, single, continuous, and then like a timer mode. It's pretty self-explanatory, but I don't know who the f*** is out here shooting continuously on an X-Pan, but if you are, you should probably die. This shot is kind of dope. I think it needs in the foreground. Mid ground is the boats, and in the deep far background is the rock. Willem Verbeek's rock. Oh, dude. There's a stork out there too, or swan? Crane? Something. I'm gonna try and get that in the photo as well, but I gotta be quick. F16. Okay, I gotta back up a little. This shot is pretty good. It's maybe one of the better ones in this video, so I don't know. Definitely lower your expectations. I've always shot my X-Pan in manual mode because I'm a real photographer. Just kidding. I actually never even really realized that it had an auto shutter speed mechanism. If I had realized that sooner, I probably would have used it more. Anyway, in manual mode, there are two arrows in the viewfinder here that show you over or under exposure. Basically, it just tells you which way to throw the aperture or throw the shutter speed to get a correct exposure. It's a lot like the M6. Actually, a lot of features on the M6 are kind of copied here, but yeah, if you can afford one, you probably can't afford the other. So go ahead and start on your path towards committing war crimes, I guess. And of course, worry not. If you're a commitment phobe who's never had a relationship work out and will probably die alone, the X-Pan isn't going to force you to commit to pano or standard full frame for the entire roll. You can actually switch between the two formats mid-roll if you like. Though if someone catches you shooting standard full frame on an X-Pan, you might get punched in the throat, robbed, and left to die. If you shoot only pano for an entire roll, you get about 20 or maybe 21 exposures on a standard 36 exposure roll. It's something like that. I can't actually remember. Oh, it's hella muddy over here. Anyway, at the next location, basically along John Silver's, we had decent lighting and great subjects. Personally, I love shooting seaside stuff. It was a recipe for potentially some great photos, one might think. Anyway, after feeding the seagulls Alka-Seltzer for some, I guess, evening entertainment, I had found my first comp. It's not exactly terrible, but in a lot of ways, yeah, it is actually terrible. Let's talk lenses. You have three options. So choose wisely. Well, you really have two options. Let me explain. The 45mm lens is the standard for this camera. It's the one I have. In pano mode, it's roughly like a 24mm equivalent to full frame. And yeah, it's got some vignetting. It's not unbearable on color negative or black and white, but for some reason on slide film, it is definitely super noticeable. Like this shot. The 90mm is another excellent choice for this camera. I do not own it, but on full frame, it kind of boils down to like a 55mm equivalent. And it makes the frame lines in your viewfinder a bit tinier. I don't know. Like I said, I have no experience with it. I like kissing. The final lens in the set is a 30mm and it's a beast. 30mm is just a bit too wide for the onboard viewfinder. So you need an auxiliary viewfinder to use that lens. But the rangefinder is still paired. So that's kind of nice. When you're in pano mode, that lens is like equivalent to something like a 18mm in full frame terms. And it costs just about as much as my first car. Of course, I am a bougie asshole and definitely had to be rolling in luxury. But when I wasn't getting hit on by beautiful models who just wanted me for my car, I was dreaming about that wonderful 30mm lens. Can I fit this in frame? Do I expose for the highlights or the shadows or go in between maybe? Like I mentioned, these lenses definitely have vignetting and it can get kind of ugly. To remedy the vignetting, you can acquire one of these. It is a center filter that costs, dear Lord, way too much money for a f**king filter. It better offer complimentary sexual favors for that price. And guess what? It doesn't. It actually f**ks you. With these center filters in place, you're actually losing about a stop to like a stop and a half of light. So that 30mm 5.6 lens effectively becomes like a 30mm f8. With the sea dogs a barking and reminding all of us that sailors used to, I guess, think these things were mermaids because of, I don't know, horny sea blindness. I kept popping some shots away. This old ass car just rolled by. It looked f**king crazy cool. There are kind of some third-party lenses that can be used with the X-Pan. Do remember that the format here is technically medium format. I've used the Nikkor 35mm shift lens with a Nikon F to X-Pan adapter in the past to some effectiveness, but it doesn't quite cover the format fully. Some people have suggested to me the Laowa 15mm 0D shift lens, saying that it covers or maybe mostly covers. Just so you know, a 15mm lens in pano mode equates to something like a 9mm rectilinear lens on full frame. So that's a look that's definitely hard to swallow, but it's probably worth it. Like swallowing batteries. Speaking of batteries, this camera, it do take them. It literally won't work without them. It takes a CR2 batteries, I believe, which can be a little bit pricey. Luckily, the X-Pan will tell you when it's starting to get hungry. One final piece of drama that I've seen on the X-Pan is this light leak s**t. I've actually seen it happen three times, once on my copy. I literally couldn't figure it out for the longest time, like years of my life wasted, until I stumbled upon some like Flickr forum post from 2003 by some guy that was probably scratching his head as much as me. Eventually, he was able to figure out that the leak was coming from the door hinge. So I guess that's a common issue on these. As you can see, I fixed mine like a professional by putting some black gaff tape over it and pretending like the problem just doesn't exist. Making the camera just about as good as new, like on the day that they were birthed, probably covered in goo. Don't have much time to take this photo. Light is going pretty quick. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know how well that'll turn out. Now, the selling point of the X-Pan is the pano mode. It's a mode that produces a beautiful 65 millimeter by 24 millimeter image. It's very cinematic. It makes almost everything look good, except when I use it, apparently. However, the pano mode on this camera can kind of also be this camera's demise, at least for me. Let's start with shooting in this wide pano mode. It definitely takes some getting used to. Sure, you might be able to pick it up and just rock it off some bangers, but I've always found that I need to shoot like five or six photos before I really start seeing in my mind's eye the widescreen format. Don't get me wrong. When you get there in your head, you can produce some amazing work. It always just takes me a few photos to kind of, I guess, unscramble my limited use brain from years of 4-3 aspect ratio training. Furthermore, on the topic of format, where do these images belong? I mean, you can do anything you want with them. I'm not going to stop you, but Instagram might. The elongated widescreen format just doesn't really fit well on that vertical platform. It just appears small and oftentimes people have to find workarounds to get it to display in its full resolution, I suppose. But to add fuel to the fire, this format doesn't really make it easy to scan either. If you're getting lab scans for this format, they typically have to find a workaround, which makes them angry. And trust me, you don't want to anger these people. I've always scanned these X-Pan shots at home with a digital camera. I actually scan them as halves and then merge them together to maximize the resolution of the format. While it's a very cool end product, there are a couple of considerations to be had here. Like making sure you expose your lock between the two halves. And of course, leave enough overlap that the software can recognize repeating points and, you know, stitch them together at all. Another issue with this is, I guess, corner sharpness of your scanning lens. Sometimes these close-up macro lenses, the corner sharpness leaves a lot to be desired. And when you stitch, you can kind of get something that looks like this, which is pretty brutal. And the perfectionist inside of me definitely wants to light myself on fire for this abhorrent mistake. It overall just makes the scanning process for this format much more involved. And I ain't got time for that. That's what we're eating tonight. Why does this come in a plastic bag? So you can put it over your head and choke yourself. It's for those who are fans of auto-erotic asphyxiation like me. I mean, like other people. Don't look so sad. Don't tell me how to look. Now, I know you might be thinking, Wow, Jason's only getting rid of this camera because it can't shoot Aerochrome. Well, no. Okay, maybe a little. I don't want to eat the crusts because then I'll get fat. For those that don't know, there is an infrared sensor inside of the film chamber somewhere that I believe just counts the sprocket holes as it auto-advances your film. So the next frame is lined up effectively. Don't you dare ever quote my ass on that for sure. The jury online seems to be a little all over the place when it comes to the version 1s of the X-Pans being able to shoot infrared film. But this issue definitely seems like it was fixed on the X-Pan 2 or the TX2. You know, the cameras that you can't afford unless you commit war crimes. Do you remember that from earlier? I'm gonna shoot some black and white tomorrow with an orange filter on the X-Pan. It's gonna look slicky orange. Time for another roll. Today we're doing Kentmere Pan 400 and we're gonna use an orange filter. We're gonna be pushing this Kentmere to 3200. Hope you're cool with that. Oh damn it. Definitely gonna need a fast shutter speed. Maybe I'll go auto on this, on this roll. What do you think? I decided not to go auto on this. It doesn't tell you what shutter speed it's going to use in the viewfinder. So I'd rather go manual in that case. Yeah. But here's the real heavy-hitting reason that I'm committing to a messy breakup with this TX1. My look just does not work with this format. And I'm not just talking about this camera with my utada. What I mean, of course, is my overall photographic look. I shoot a lot of warmed up ectochrome these days for most of my work. And well, as you can probably tell, I wasn't super enthusiastic about the combination of that look and the pano format. They just didn't gel together. It felt quite lackluster. And frankly, I was kind of expecting more from, you know, the good light and good subject matter. Black and white also looks okay in the pano format, but it's never really wowed me either. At least not more than, you know, traditional formats. Oh, those are thorny. Anything for the shot though. Might not be close enough. I was going to take this photo, but I don't think I'm close enough. And I don't really want to get closer. The composition does not spark joy. You know what I mean? So in the past few months, I've been talking like kind of extensively on a format choice and ultimately came to the conclusion that I don't really know what I'm talking about. And that, yeah, pano just doesn't really match the rest of my work. There you go. Like I said before, I usually kind of just think and operate a bit more effectively in the more confined 4 to 3 aspect ratio. And I think my work reflects that. If I put together a portfolio with like 90%, you know, 4 to 3 aspect ratio work and then throw in some pano stuff, it might look a little bit mismatched. And those pano shots will kind of stand out. Maybe for some people that's a good thing. But for me, ultimately, I don't think that's going to work. 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I've been using Squarespace to host my own portfolio for several years now, as well as feature my commissioned work. And the setup was easier than ever. And best of all, if you run into any snags at any point, you can get in touch with Squarespace's award-winning 24-7 customer support or find the answer you need amongst the always available help forums. So what are you waiting for? If you're ready to build a website, you can start a free trial today at squarespace.com slash grainydays. And if you use the code grainydays at checkout, you can get 10% off your first purchase. There is a world out there where I'd just love to keep shooting with the X-Pan and have my portfolio be dominantly pano work. But with the X-Pan being the only camera that can really deliver this format and them getting more expensive and harder to find, and also them being electronic, which means if they die, they're dead. I can't really effectively rely on this camera to keep making work with in the future. That, and I guess if I look introspectively, but not too far, because I'll cry. I just don't really see my photography in this aspect ratio. Gotta get this shot quick before Caleb moves. Nice. After four years of using it, I just think this camera works for a specific vibe and you kind of have to commit to using it. You know, the cinematic vibe or the wide landscape vibe. It looks really cool and it'll definitely give your work an edge above all else. And we all love edging. You just have to decide if it's for you. It's not for me. And I will be selling this camera. All right, one more shot. Final shot. I think I know what it's going to be. Every roll ends with a classic. Whirr. Anyway, in the end, all of that is why I'm saying a very sad adios to this classic camera. And if I'm being frank, it's also because stonks are high right now. And like Mr. Krabs, I'm always chasing after that green s**t.