Images shot on Kentmere Pan 200 in the Reto Pano
Let me start this account of putting my first roll of film through the Reto Pano in Nottingham by saying this: I like Reto.
A few years ago I bought their Ultra Wide & Slim camera and enjoyed shooting with that. I picked up their Kodak Ektar H35 too, which was also good, and then was very happy to hear from them when they sent me the upgraded H35N to try out.
Now they have another camera out. And they were nice enough to send me one of these too.
Don’t misunderstand. I don’t like Reto because they send me cameras. I like them because the cameras they make are good. They all have something different about them.
The UWS had an ultra wide lens. The H35 and H35N were half frame. And now this one, the Reto Pano, has an option to shoot panoramic shots. Like these coming up first.
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Panoramic shots with the Reto Pano in Nottingham
I enjoyed making these.
In panoramic mode, the viewfinder of the Reto Pano narrows to a letterbox style so you can compose pretty much how you want your images to look.
You can read in my review of this camera exactly how that works. For this post here though, all we need to say is that it works well and that I had a good time out there thinking and shooting with a different field of view than normal.
The light was good and trying out some panoramic street photography was a lot of fun.
Normal aspect shots with the Reto Pano in Nottingham
If shooting a whole roll of film in panoramic mode sounds a little too much for you, the Reto Pano has you covered.
Its simple mechanism allows you to switch between that and a more normal aspect ratio. Even with this non-panoramic setting though, your shots are still going to have a pretty non-standard look to them, thanks to the 22mm lens in this thing.
I like wide lenses. The vast majority of the time I use my Pentax MX, I use the 28mm lens rather than the 50mm. I just prefer filling a wider scene than having too close a composition.
So naturally, I enjoyed using the Reto Pano with it set to its normal aspect ratio as much as I did with its panoramic mode.
This was to be expected for another reason too. This is the same lens that Reto used in the Ultra Wide & Slim a few years ago, and I liked using that and the results it gave me back then.
Shooting horizontal panoramic diptychs
When I tried out the Kodak Ektar H35 and H35N before, I played about with creating some diptychs. Like these I did in Manchester. I enjoyed doing them, from the ideation to the shooting to the editing and putting them together on screen.
With a half frame camera, where the normal aspect for your images is in portrait rather than landscape, it made sense to put two of them next to each other.
That gave me the inspiration to try a similar thing with the Reto Pano in Nottingham – albeit this time, the images in the diptychs would be horizontal and above and below each other.
A less natural-feeling way to do it, to me, but one I had a go at nonetheless. I think some of the results made it a worthwhile endeavour.
I like how those trees line up on that one. It makes them look a lot taller than they are at first glance.
That was a deliberate thing, although I wasn’t quite that accurate when shooting. It did take some cropping to get them like that when I was putting these together.
The final two diptychs below show another idea I had for these whilst out with this camera. If the Reto Pano can take photographs with a normal aspect ratio as well as panoramic ones, why not do a diptych combining these?
So I gave that a go too. First up is the double-panoramic version, and then the mixed one.
Mind your fingers Tino
Did you notice that big black smudge in the top right corner of that last diptych? Guess what that was?
Allow me to introduce you to the biggest problem that I encountered with the Reto Pano.
Maybe encountered isn’t the right word. This wasn’t caused by some design fault or anything else wrong with the camera. It’s more like the biggest problem I created for myself when using the Reto Pano.
On occasion, I had my finger(s) too close to the lens when shooting. On other cameras that don’t have such a wide lens, I could have gotten away with this. But because this one has a lot of peripheral vision, so to speak, these shots contain my encroaching digits.
And to paraphrase the Macho Man Randy Savage, I don’t dig it.
Wrapping up this first time shooting the Reto Pano
It’s a shame that happened to those images there, but at least I can post about it here and warn you that it’s easily done.
Unfortunately for me, I shot another roll in the Reto Pano before I got this one developed and had some similarly ruined shots on that one too. But I’ll definitely be more careful now the next, next time.
All in all though, I like this camera and am happy with the majority of the shots I got with it. It’s good fun to use too, be that in panoramic mode or just the standard wide-angle one.
If you want to know more about it, I recommend reading my full review. You can find that right here. Oh yeah!
If you liked that account of shooting my first roll in the Reto Pano in Nottingham, why not have a look at some of these other film photo essays too:
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