Activate panorama mode

The Pentax Espio 140M that I bought for the princely sum of £1 at the steam rally the other week seems to work ok. It’s sharp (although maybe not quite as sharp as the Canon Sure Shot’s I own), and is very compact. The lens still seems pretty decent even when zoomed, and it has a range of metering and focussing modes that neither of my Sure Shot’s have.

It also has a panorama mode. At last, I can get those Hasselblad X-Pan type shots I always dreamed of. Well, kinda. Panorama mode here, like many other 35mm compacts with the feature, is actually achieved by way of a mask that blocks part of the frame, so all you’re really getting is a standard 35mm shot but with big black bars obscuring the top and bottom of the image. The same mask is visible in the viewfinder when the setting is activated, which does make composing the shots straightforward.

While it won’t give the resolution that an X-Pan (or a medium format camera with 35mm back) will provide, the results aren’t too bad, even if they could easily be achieved with any other camera by just cropping your image.

So, without further ado, here are four panoramas taken with the camera. Can you guess which two are actually just crops of a full 35mm frame done in Lightroom because I’d badly composed the images in-camera? 🙂