Working up to the ultimate RB67 35mm panoramic setup, tonight I took another step.
Now, you can't do this with just any 35mm camera -- in my experience, most don't have a removable take up spool, but the ones that do are mostly pre-War designs, like the Contax II/III and their clones (and mutated, evolved clones), the Kiev rangefinder line.
Now, since I have a Kiev 4, I thought it would be fun to load it up with a cassette to receive the film rather than just letting it roll up on a spool. I noticed when I first got the camera that the supplied spool (with Cyrillic letters that look like "Cueb" and would translate as Kiev molded in one flange) looked just like the spool out of a reloadable 35mm cassette. I compared it, and it's dimensionally identical. The only differences that might matter are that the Kiev spool has texture on the long end, presumably to let you grab it and roll the film that first turn, and it has the slot that lets you slip the film leader in.
When winding into a cassette, however, there's no strong reason not to just tape the film to the spool. I've done that with bulk loads for years, and now I've done it while loading a camera. I used my recently acquired Griswold film cutter to cut a perfectly square end on the fresh roll of XP2 Super, removing the trimmed leader, disassembled the empty cassette, and turned the spool upside down. This is critical in order for the cassette to work in the take up side of the camera. That done, I tore off a couple inches of masking tape, secured the film end to the spool core, and slipped the film into the velvet trap in the cassette before putting the cap back on.
It took a minute or so to set up the cassette, and literally five seconds to load the camera after I'd done so. That was slick. I don't think I'll carry all my 35mm film preloaded to cassette take up, because it needs twice the space, can't be put back into a film can, and I only have a couple cameras that can use this setup, but it certainly works well for the Kiev. Even better, when you come to the end of the roll, if you're watching the frame counter, you can just fire off two frames of nothing (even with the lens cap on), open the camera, and take out the film, secure in the knowledge that all your images are safe inside the cassette. No rewinding for five minutes with that fiddly little knob (no crank on a Kiev 4). Also, if you have a camera with a back that's not very secure (my Kiev isn't one of those, at least), this method, similar to the "prewind" used by some point&shoot models, protects (most of) your exposed frames inside the cassette.
Now, you can't do this with just any 35mm camera -- in my experience, most don't have a removable take up spool, but the ones that do are mostly pre-War designs, like the Contax II/III and their clones (and mutated, evolved clones), the Kiev rangefinder line.
Now, since I have a Kiev 4, I thought it would be fun to load it up with a cassette to receive the film rather than just letting it roll up on a spool. I noticed when I first got the camera that the supplied spool (with Cyrillic letters that look like "Cueb" and would translate as Kiev molded in one flange) looked just like the spool out of a reloadable 35mm cassette. I compared it, and it's dimensionally identical. The only differences that might matter are that the Kiev spool has texture on the long end, presumably to let you grab it and roll the film that first turn, and it has the slot that lets you slip the film leader in.
When winding into a cassette, however, there's no strong reason not to just tape the film to the spool. I've done that with bulk loads for years, and now I've done it while loading a camera. I used my recently acquired Griswold film cutter to cut a perfectly square end on the fresh roll of XP2 Super, removing the trimmed leader, disassembled the empty cassette, and turned the spool upside down. This is critical in order for the cassette to work in the take up side of the camera. That done, I tore off a couple inches of masking tape, secured the film end to the spool core, and slipped the film into the velvet trap in the cassette before putting the cap back on.
It took a minute or so to set up the cassette, and literally five seconds to load the camera after I'd done so. That was slick. I don't think I'll carry all my 35mm film preloaded to cassette take up, because it needs twice the space, can't be put back into a film can, and I only have a couple cameras that can use this setup, but it certainly works well for the Kiev. Even better, when you come to the end of the roll, if you're watching the frame counter, you can just fire off two frames of nothing (even with the lens cap on), open the camera, and take out the film, secure in the knowledge that all your images are safe inside the cassette. No rewinding for five minutes with that fiddly little knob (no crank on a Kiev 4). Also, if you have a camera with a back that's not very secure (my Kiev isn't one of those, at least), this method, similar to the "prewind" used by some point&shoot models, protects (most of) your exposed frames inside the cassette.