Lately I’ve been obsessing over the Hasselblad XPAN rangefinder camera. It’s a film camera from the 1990s which shoots in an unconventional 65:24 aspect ratio (pretty much two 35mm frames side by side) to create a wide panoramic image.
Why it’s so appealing (to me, and many film nerds)
The panoramic format, coupled with the softness of film makes anything you shoot — no matter how mundane — instantly look cinematic. It’s incredibly powerful and lets you frame scenes in a very refreshing new way; e.g. allowing to show more context around your subject.
However, the XPAN is long out of production and surviving models are dearer than diamonds. There’s no way I’m going to drop €5000+ on an unfixable, battered second-hand camera, so I set out to reproduce the experience as closely as possible for the device I always have on me; my iPhone (which happens to have a camera that should be able to get close to the quality of a 1990s 35mm format film camera — even a Hasselblad).
My objective:
create a hyper-focused photo app that does one thing really well; every time I press the shutter a movie-still should come out. All I need to worry about is making the frame interesting, the app should do all the other stuff…
Making XP4N
The first step — making a camera app that shoots in 65x24 format — is relatively easy. If you’ve worked with Apple’s mobile APIs before (which I have) you can have such a photo app running in a day.
But that’s not what you want. Because photos coming out of today’s digital cameras, and particularly out of phone cameras, have a distinct look. A look which says “I’m a digital photo”.
It’s in the sharpness, dynamic range, contrast curves, color balance, white and black tones, saturation — virtually every aspect of a cinematic film image is different from a typical digital photo.
So the hard part is making the photos coming out of your app look like film (or rather: non-digital). And “cinematic” at that.
This is not a new concept. There are many Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials on the subject, and many image editing tools offer filters and presets to give digital images a faux-film appearance. But I want the app to do it for me, while shooting. I like the concept of fully committing to a look before hitting the shutter button— just like in the days of film.
Film simulations
I chose to offer four color film simulations/inspirations (my aim is not to fully emulate any particular film, but mimic the essence of their personalities) to cover a range of shooting situations; inspired by Cinestill 800T, Vision3 250D, Lomochrome Metropolis and Portra 400. The former two are actually directly derived from film stock used in the movie industry.
These film modes are dynamic; i.e. they respond to exposure values and other aspects of the photo. So it does quite a bit more than a ‘simple’ preset filter in an image editor.
And because Apple took its sweet time reviewing the app, I also decided to add a black & white film modes while I was waiting. I picked the Ilford Ortho Plus and HP5 Plus as starting points. The former has a nice and contrasty film with a bias towards blues (meaning blues become lighter and reds become slightly darker gray tones) and the latter being nice and soft with a dreamy look.
Vision3 and Portra are popular film stocks for daylight shooting. They are quite versatile and produce soft images, with Portra having a bias towards warm pastel hues (good for skin tones) and Vision3 being neutral/warm, very detailed (fine grain) and with a broad dynamic range — for film. Metropolis has a very particular look: very desaturated and gritty (in the film world achieved through a bleaching process).
One challenge of making the pictures feel less digital was dealing with the excessive sharpness of phone camera images. Rather than simply doing a tiny blur, XP4N treats the center of the image differently from corners, and makes a distinction between highlights and shadows for doing its subtle ‘unsharpening’.
One thing that XP4N does not do is add artificial blemishes like excessive grain and fake light leaks etc. You can add those later in PP if you like, but I didn’t want to bake those into the out-of-camera images.
Of the three color simulations, Cinestill is the most interesting. It’s commonly used for moody night-time photography with a color shift towards teal/blue and has a signature “halation” effect.
Halation is caused by light passing through the film and reflecting back onto the furthest (red) layer of the film, causing a red/orange glow around the brightest spots in the image.
In addition to halation, the 800T emulation also does the tungsten-compensation (the “T” in 800T) which causes the moody green color shift in the images.
I feel XP4N came out as a pretty sweet little app. I’ve already had several nights of fun running around the industrial areas in my town and getting a feel for the magic that these film sims put into my shots. I’m also happy to report that many of the shots indeed don’t need any further editing to really shine (although you certainly can if you want to).
If you also like to give it a go, you can find XP4N on the iOS AppStore for the princely sum of €0.99 (I chose not to make the app completely free, because quite some time and dedication went into the project, as simple as it looks. I like to believe my time and skills have value — and this is still cheaper than using the loo at a gas station these days 😅 ).
