Featured History Tom Cobbs & The Savage Truth Of Large Format Film

Ryan submitted a new blog post:

Tom Cobbs & The Savage Truth Of Large Format Film

Continue reading the Original Blog Post

 

For everything I’ve posted from the Tom Cobbs archive so far, I’ve kept my hands off the images... no edits, no tweaks, just raw history as it was scanned. But this one felt different. A large format negative deserves a little respect, so I brushed off the dust, evened out the tones, and gave it the same care any film shooter would before hanging it on the wall.

The scan came in at a ridiculous 100 megapixels. I’ll never be able to show it online with the kind of crisp, surgical sharpness it has here on my screen… but trust me, fellas - this one’s a monster.

 

This is blown up to about the limit before resolution starts to really suffer...

 

That picture is Dope.
Detail well done.
What's really crazy is for those with little to no knowledge of your photography experience or film detail risk taking might think (with the world we live in now) might think the full size version is AI.......
The detail in this one well done.

 

It's hard to say... All I have is the scan. But Bob was known for shooting portraits with both a 4x5 Graflex and a 8x10 Deardorff field camera. The scan is essentially 20,000 by 25,000 pixels.

 

I’ve never shot, held, or even fondled a large-format camera. Medium format? Barely. I’ve sniffed around a few, but never pulled the trigger. Still, there’s a dark, festering corner of my mind that keeps whispering Hasselblad 500… some day, I’ll cave and buy one just to see what the world looks like through that square glass portal.

But what really keeps me up at night isn’t format... it’s aspect ratio. I’m obsessed with the shape of the frame. For years, I ran my dad’s Hasselblad X-Pan which is a strange, glorious bastard of a camera that shoots two 35mm frames at once to make a panoramic negative. Here’s an example from the X-Pan:



Glorious, right? That’s the 65:24 aspect ratio - basically Super Panavision 70, the same cinematic canvas that carried Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It just feels right... epic, sweeping vibes of classic Hollywood.

Problem is, the X-Pan has turned into a collector’s racket. I sold my kit for something like $12k because I couldn’t justify carrying a camera worth more than a decent Honda Civic. Plus, they’re all ticking time bombs... the electronics rot out, and once that motherboard dies, it’s a very expensive paperweight that can't be fixed.

So now what? I still want that cinematic frame, that movie-screen scope… but film options are thin, overpriced, or unreliable. You know what’s not? Old digital rigs with BIG sensors. Pair one with the right glass, and suddenly it’s just a software problem. I can crop to 65:24 all day, but I want to see that ratio through the viewfinder, not imagine it after the fact.

Anyway, this is all a long, nerdy way of saying: I’m cooking up a DIY monstrosity to scratch the itch. And if it works, you’ll see the results soon enough.

 

First test shot of my pseudo DIY X-Pan digital camera...



Not great... Think I need a bigger more modern sensor to pull this off...

 

That’s a wide angle lens at something like f16 and a super long exposure.

 

I tried to "calibrate" the sensor distance on this camera so that I could accurately focus to infinity on an adapted vintage Leica lens... And... It WORKED! But in the process, I damaged the sensor itself. Now, I get really bad vignetting, strange color shifts, and terrible IQ.



Just as well I guess... This old camera body was pretty beat, I need a bigger sensor to start, and it was a pretty good learning experience.

From what I've learned, I can absolutely pull this off... I just need to gather my confidence, spend a little money on a body with a bigger sensor, and fucking send it. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.

The end goal here is to have a dedicated digital camera that I can take 65:24 aspect ratio images with. From there, I want to develop a LUT that spits out colors similar to Kodachrome. The dream is to have a camera that I can shoot hot rods with that look straight off a Super Panavision 70 screen from the early 1960's.