I picked up a Vivitar PN2011 twenty years ago at a Las Cruces thrift shop for two bucks. I was impressed with the sharp pictures that the simple point-and-shoot could produce. I only shot a couple rolls with that camera before I got distracted with all the others I was finding at bargain prices at that time on ebay. The best of the PN2011 pictures came from a Campo Santo in Las Cruces and from a trip to the most southern Chaco outlier on Alamosa Creek.
I turned that original PN2011 into a pinhole camera and never used the panoramic format option. I found another in Albuquerque at about the same price as the first and decided to try it as a panoramic shooter during a walk through the Botanic Garden. The film on this occasion was Kodak Gold 200.
The pictures from this second PN2011 don't seem as sharp to me as the ones I got from the first one, so I may have to look for another.
Switching to panoramic mode changes the view through the finder and narrows the image width on the film with a couple movable panels. The altered view may help a bit with visualizing the panoramic potential of the scene, but not much is gained in camera that can't be achieved by just cropping the full image.
2 comments:
I wish I had been as smart as you to pick up cheap cameras on eBay around 2005, when people were dumping their film equipment in bulk. I fell for the siren call off digital for a few years, and I stupidly sold some nice film cameras. Then I bought back similar models ......
I actually got back to doing any kind of photography with a cheap little digital. Luckily, I had held onto my Spotmatic, so I had something to shoot film with when I had the urge. That was when ebay was first getting going, so picking up a variety of film cameras was effortless (and addictive).
Around that same time I put together a web page and maintained that for a few years until Google Blogger became an option.
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