I realised that only too well when using a Hasselblad XPan... the panoramic viewpoint did far more in a "creative" sense than I had expected of it and the extraordinarily high quality of the images was unexpectedly good too. I can imagine that a number of photographers after trying the camera for a day or so were equally hooked and purchased one for much of their photographic work... or pleasure.

In fact one might only have needed the basic body and standard (or wide depending on the way you looked at it) 45mm lens for most situations. However, the expensive but popular 30mm XPan lens, urging even greater creative freedom in the panoramic 35mm format, was snapped up by travel and advertising photographers en masse so perhaps I didn't truly seen the light with that system... but with my lack of purchasing power then I was never likely to. You will note that I have lapsed into the past tense... tha Hasselblad XPan is no longer manufactured... but there are enough of them in circulation to be readily available in the "pre-owned" market so I will continue to write as if they are current.

Maybe the public was ready for the XPan when it was launched just over a decade ago. It happened at the same time as a flurry of new lenses from independent manufacturers in Japan and from the Leica factory in Germany were announced for the venerable Leica screw-mount camera... all at the time when was so much talk of digital imaging taking over from traditional 35mm photography.

As it happened not only were there several fast-aperture optics from Voigtländer released at the time but other companies had decide to join the fray with their own niche-marketed specialities including, from Konica, the big, expensive and super-fast 60mm f/1.2 Hexanon... all of which partly goes to show that when a movement such as auto-focus or digital advances rapidly in one direction there is a natural tendency and then a reaction to not simply step back in the opposite direction but to return to the more traditional ways of doing things in the darkroom, or with cameras, manually.

In a similar vein, I read somewhere recently that the sign of when a technology is truly dead is when an increasing number of people pay much more than the original cost in order to experience it... the steam train was quoted as a typical example - in America today there are more passenger miles carried than when steam was in decline in the 1960s.

However, dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists had never expected a 35mm camera from Hasselblad... and when it arrived not only was it 35mm but "panoramic" too. And the package didn't stop there... normal 24x36mm 35mm frame size and 24x65mm panoramic shots could not only be captured on the same roll of film, but rapidly changed on the fly at the flick of a switch!

Some no doubt thought such a feature was a gimmick which would not catch on... but, my-oh-my how they were wrong. The interchangeable normal-to-panoramic-and-back is such a success that I still think now what I thought those ten or so years ago... that if I had to make a decision on which one-and-only-one camera to own it would be the XPan. In fact I would go so far as to say that I would not change my mind even if there would only be one lens allowed... because I would, even given the choice of the three available 30mm, 45mm and 90mm lenses, choose the standard 45mm lens to go with it.

This has been strengthened in my mind because for the past fifteen years or so I've been primarily a standard 50mm lens-toting photographer. Whether it be on my Leica M3 using a "Dual-range" f/2 Summicron, either of two Nikon F2 plain-prism bodies with 50mm f/2 and f/1.4 Nikkor, Lotus Rapid View 5x7 inch... OK it uses a much longer focal length but the 210mm Nikkor for 5x7 inch film is the equivalent of a 50mm standard for the 35mm format, and even on my (now sold... merde!) Leica IIIf "Red Dial / Delayed Action" on which I only ever used the noted "Red Scale" 50mm Elmar.

The 45mm Fuji lens for the Hasselblad XPan (Fuji made the body too... and the Japanese home-market version called "Fujifilm TX-1" in titanium silver finish with a wood-grained (teak?) hand grip and tan-coloured leather / nylon neck strap looked simply stunning!) was designed to cover the full width of the extended 65mm long format, and as such is the equivalent of a 25mm lens when in panorama mode.

To be continued...