Super-Sized Sprocket Hole Photography

It's fall in New England and rather easy to find some nice scenery for taking photos. Though this time I decided to experiment and complicate things a bit. I wanted to include the film's sprocket holes as part of the picture area to achieve some nice framing effect. That's typically done by loading 35mm film into a medium format camera. So I found some 135 to 120 film format adapters on eBay that let me do that. Though then I also wanted to get as much of a panoramic effect as possible. That means my 6x6 medium format camera wasn't quite up to the task.

I happen to have a 6x9 roll film back for my Graflex Super Graphic large format camera. So the final setup was: Kodak Ektar 35mm film in a 120 film adapter in a 6x9 roll film back attached to a 4x5 large format camera! The nice thing about this is that I can shoot panoramic images with sprocket holes. And I can also use the front standard movement of the Super Graphic camera to move the focus plane to where I need it. I typically used front tilt to get both the foreground and background elements in focus.

As shown on the setup photo above, I created templates for both the ground glass and the "sports finder" of the camera to show me the actual area of the image.

Below are my favorites from the one roll of film I shot last Sunday while exploring some conservation land areas in Andover, MA.