It’s fair to say I’m mildly obsessed with panoramas. I once owned one of the fabled (and now eye-wateringly expensive) Hasselblad XPan cameras, but couldn’t get on with the rangefinder format. I love compact cameras with masks that fake a panoramic effect on a 35mm frame. I love stitching shots together to make a patchwork of colour and different exposures. To be honest, the more experimental, the better – which is why when I saw a Horizon S3 Pro for sale on eBay for cheaper than usual, I snapped it up.
It’s a chunky, rounded plastic monstrosity with a curved shutter plane and a rotating lens, capable of producing ridiculously wide and distorted images. It’s also an absolute bastard to load, and if you mess it up, it will eat your film and refuse to advance or rewind. I managed 9 shots before having to rip the film out of the camera in a dark bag, but luckily AG-Photolab managed to salvage one good shot from the ruined mess of film. Luckily it was loaded with one of my many rolls of hoarded Agfa Vista 200, so no expensive film was lost.
Tara (pictured above), my best and oldest friend, inspired me to join her on a 13-mile walk to raise money for Alzheimer’s and dementia, a cause close to both our hearts. We decided to do a bit of training, and so walked the Cheddar Gorge trail one drizzly Saturday, to see how we got on. It was a fantastic day out, even though the Horizon threw its tantrum in the first half hour of the walk.
We’ll be doing our walk in September, if you fancy sponsoring our little team of two, please donate here.