Modifying a folding camera to turn it into a 6x3 "half-frame" medium format camera

fabulousrice · Jun 30, 2024

I recently modified a Zenobia camera to be able to shoot 6x3 photos on it.

I think that 6x3 is a wonderful format, and I've always found it extremely shocking that there were no 6x3 cameras out there.
I hope that people will modify their cameras to shoot more photos per roll of 120 (so, up to 24 photos per roll) and also produce a gorgeous panoramic result.

The video of my process is here. At the end there are samples of the photos taken with it.

I'd love to hear people's feedback, please remain constructive

Dustin McAmera · Jun 30, 2024

Nice!

It says here that Philips (the Dutch electronics firm) had a special Rolleicord made that can do 3x6cm:

Rolleicord IIb - Camera-wiki.org - The free camera encyclopedia

camera-wiki.org

I wonder if they wanted them to sell, or did they use them themselves for something. I guess they were for photographing oscilloscopes (you know - those short, wide oscilloscopes) or something like that.

I see at Rolleiclub the Philips Rolleicord (number 21; scroll down a bit) is listed as using 35mm film, so if that's true would only be 6x2.4 at most. However, the format is given as 3x6cm both at twinlensreflex.eu and in a listing at Westlicht:

https://www.leitz-auction.com/en/Rolleicord-II-Philips/AI-12-20627 (sadly no good photos of it). It says the format was achieved with a removable mask, which was missing in the one they sold.

Sandro.m · Jun 30, 2024

fabulousrice said:
I recently modified a Zenobia camera to be able to shoot 6x3 photos on it.

I think that 6x3 is a wonderful format, and I've always found it extremely shocking that there were no 6x3 cameras out there.
I hope that people will modify their cameras to shoot more photos per roll of 120 (so, up to 24 photos per roll) and also produce a gorgeous panoramic result.

The video of my process is here. At the end there are samples of the photos taken with it.

I'd love to hear people's feedback, please remain constructive

Excellent job!
How did you make the 6x3 mask?

Andrew O'Neill · Jun 30, 2024

Nice work!

BobUK · Jun 30, 2024

Sandro.m said:
Excellent job!
How did you make the 6x3 mask?

He mentions it is a slide mask in the captions.

Very clever idea.
It would be a heart in the mouth moment for me when taking a drill to a perfectly good working camera.

I am definitely going to give this some thought.

Nice one.

Dan Fromm · Jun 30, 2024

Interesting. Three questions:

What do you use for a viewfinder?

The modified camera's native orientation is portrait. How uncomfortable is shooting landscape orientation?

Nominal 6x6 is usually 56 x 56 or 57 x 57. What are your nominal 3x6 (or 6x3) gate's dimensions?

fabulousrice · Jun 30, 2024

Sandro.m said:
Excellent job!
How did you make the 6x3 mask?

I bought Canson Colorline #38 Black 150GSM sheets of cardboard (.99 each) at the art store, and used a Cricut machine to cut a rectangle the shape of the camera's window, with a hollowed out 6x3 window inside.

fabulousrice · Jun 30, 2024

BobUK said:
He mentions it is a slide mask in the captions.

Very clever idea.
It would be a heart in the mouth moment for me when taking a drill to a perfectly good working camera.

I am definitely going to give this some thought.

Nice one.

The thought of drilling it was really making me hesitate to be honest.
But I kept thinking about how wonderful it would be to be able to perfectly space out each photo on the negative...
And to be honest these folding cameras are not anywhere near extinct or rare, and people struggle to sell them on ebay even for $25.
And the trick is - it still shoots 6x45 if I want it to. Just remove the 6x3 mask, and use the center window when advancing, and voilà.
I definitely think I added a feature rather than removed anything from it... I'm just really surprised no one ever made a folding camera natively shooting 6x3.

fabulousrice · Jun 30, 2024

Dustin McAmera said:
Nice!

It says here that Philips (the Dutch electronics firm) had a special Rolleicord made that can do 3x6cm:

Rolleicord IIb - Camera-wiki.org - The free camera encyclopedia

camera-wiki.org

I wonder if they wanted them to sell, or did they use them themselves for something. I guess they were for photographing oscilloscopes (you know - those short, wide oscilloscopes) or something like that.

I see at Rolleiclub the Philips Rolleicord (number 21; scroll down a bit) is listed as using 35mm film, so if that's true would only be 6x2.4 at most. However, the format is given as 3x6cm both at twinlensreflex.eu and in a listing at Westlicht:

https://www.leitz-auction.com/en/Rolleicord-II-Philips/AI-12-20627 (sadly no good photos of it). It says the format was achieved with a removable mask, which was missing in the one they sold.

Wow that is a wonderful find!
A friend of mine did adapt his Yashica to shoot 6x3 after we talked about it. He just placed a mask in the camera and in the viewfinder. His camera looks like the one in your link.

But what I love about half-frame cameras is always the ability to put them in your pocket and chose them as your go-to camera even if you don't have a bag because they can fit in a pocket.
I got the idea after using a Bencini Koroll 24S, which is a camera the manufacturers made by using one of their 6x6 designs and changing the back to a back with two windows.

Sadly, the Bencini has very few features (two shutter speeds and aperture settings), and the mask in the camera isn't 6x3 but 4.5x3 for some mysterious reason (to keep a ratio that looks like 35mm?) therefore it's a sad waste of space and not that much bigger than a 35mm negative.
I considered having a new 3d printed 6x3 mask for the Bencini, or cutting into the Bencini's mask to make it go from 4.5x3 to 6x3, but cutting in straight lines in the sheet metal seemed very hard, I don't have the tools for that.

Also, modifying a Bencini or using a Zenobia is an easy choice, the Zenobia being far superior in many ways especially portability.

fabulousrice · Jun 30, 2024

Dan Fromm said:
Interesting. Three questions:

What do you use for a viewfinder?

The modified camera's native orientation is portrait. How uncomfortable is shooting landscape orientation?

Nominal 6x6 is usually 56 x 56 or 57 x 57. What are your nominal 3x6 (or 6x3) gate's dimensions?

The negatives I get are 55 x 30mm

For viewfinder, I've always loved the Photopia manual rangefinders, they are well designed and work with most cameras.
Framing and shooting isn't too hard, I've always been centering my shots and the camera was always a portrait orientation camera (6x45 to 6x3), so I just mentally make sure to center my subject.
Shooting landscape isn't uncomfortable at all, you just rotate the camera. Kind of like using a half-frame 35mm camera, I have a few like the Olympus Pen FT, the Fujica Mini, etc.

OAPOli · Jun 30, 2024

Nice mod!

Did something similar for the Hasselblad SLR. Modified slightly the film back (removed the gear coupling to the body, disabled the auto stop at frame #1, put half-frame marks on the counter), and made a mask for the frame just behind the auxiliary shutter. You can switch format on the go using the dark slide.

PS. I was able to fix the light leak.

Chuck1 · Jun 30, 2024

Hopefully someone at pentax/ricoh sees this

skylight1b · Jul 1, 2024

fabulousrice said:
I recently modified a Zenobia camera to be able to shoot 6x3 photos on it.

I think that 6x3 is a wonderful format, and I've always found it extremely shocking that there were no 6x3 cameras out there.
I hope that people will modify their cameras to shoot more photos per roll of 120 (so, up to 24 photos per roll) and also produce a gorgeous panoramic result.

The video of my process is here. At the end there are samples of the photos taken with it.

I'd love to hear people's feedback, please remain constructive

Also just want to point out the Agfa Isolette L! Now I kind of want to find one with the included mask because I sure as hell don't trust myself to drill into a camera.

henryvk · Jul 1, 2024

fabulousrice said:
The negatives I get are 55 x 30mm

For viewfinder, I've always loved the Photopia manual rangefinders, they are well designed and work with most cameras.
Framing and shooting isn't too hard, I've always been centering my shots and the camera was always a portrait orientation camera (6x45 to 6x3), so I just mentally make sure to center my subject.
Shooting landscape isn't uncomfortable at all, you just rotate the camera. Kind of like using a half-frame 35mm camera, I have a few like the Olympus Pen FT, the Fujica Mini, etc.

Have you thought about just putting black tape onto the front viewfinder window? Put the camera on a tripod, put a ground glass screen (or tracing paper or similar, although a focusing screen with fresnel works best) over the film plane window, look at subjects at different distances and play around with taping off the edges of the viewfinder until you have a good approximation in the viewfinder of what the camera actually sees.

Obviously these folders have a lot of parallax, so best to make sure you have things pat at infinity and work from there. On one folder with a particularly large degree of parallax, I framed a target 1.5 meters away and put a black dot on the viewfinder, where the upper right corner of the FOV is on the film plane. Of course you couldn't focus on it properly when looking through the eyepiece, but it helped a lot regardless.

k.hendrik · Jul 1, 2024

56 x 26 mm back for RZ67. an ongoing saga

Mamiya RZ67 Back 120 / 24 Exp (?!) - weird problem

The pressure plate, looks large/normal sized to me (aren't the pressure plates identical for all formats?): I noticed that there are empty holes for screws, 2 on each side. Maybe this is where the correct (or any other) mask would be / had been attached. My regular 120 back is loaded...

www.photrio.com

fabulousrice · Jul 1, 2024

OAPOli said:
Nice mod!

Did something similar for the Hasselblad SLR. Modified slightly the film back (removed the gear coupling to the body, disabled the auto stop at frame #1, put half-frame marks on the counter), and made a mask for the frame just behind the auxiliary shutter. You can switch format on the go using the dark slide.

View attachment 373140

PS. I was able to fix the light leak.

WOW this is so cool! I would love to learn more - did you document your process? What frame size did you get in the end?

fabulousrice · Jul 1, 2024

Chuck1 said:
Hopefully someone at pentax/ricoh sees this

... and hires me! haha. Or Lomography! It's great time for new cameras.

fabulousrice · Jul 1, 2024

skylight1b said:
Also just want to point out the Agfa Isolette L! Now I kind of want to find one with the included mask because I sure as hell don't trust myself to drill into a camera.

Interesting! I had no idea this one existed! You may want to try a Bencini Koroll 24S (I actually have one to sell) but the window they designed is only 4.5x3 so you may want to put your own cardboard mask in there. I don't think you would be able to use the Isolette L today? They make it sound like if you use a type of film with the wrong design on the backing paper you would be lost as to what needs to show in the window for you to stop advancing.

I am super interested and let me know or come back to post on this thread for any 6x3 findings!

fabulousrice · Jul 1, 2024

henryvk said:
Have you thought about just putting black tape onto the front viewfinder window? Put the camera on a tripod, put a ground glass screen (or tracing paper or similar, although a focusing screen with fresnel works best) over the film plane window, look at subjects at different distances and play around with taping off the edges of the viewfinder until you have a good approximation in the viewfinder of what the camera actually sees.

Obviously these folders have a lot of parallax, so best to make sure you have things pat at infinity and work from there. On one folder with a particularly large degree of parallax, I framed a target 1.5 meters away and put a black dot on the viewfinder, where the upper right corner of the FOV is on the film plane. Of course you couldn't focus on it properly when looking through the eyepiece, but it helped a lot regardless.

All good suggestions! Although to be honest I usually center my subjects and feel like the risk of cutting heads off is quite low - although not 0! The camera is still in testing period and I might very well do that if I end up not framing things how I wanted.

fabulousrice · Jul 1, 2024

k.hendrik said:
56 x 26 mm back for RZ67. an ongoing saga

Mamiya RZ67 Back 120 / 24 Exp (?!) - weird problem

The pressure plate, looks large/normal sized to me (aren't the pressure plates identical for all formats?): I noticed that there are empty holes for screws, 2 on each side. Maybe this is where the correct (or any other) mask would be / had been attached. My regular 120 back is loaded...

www.photrio.com

Oh wow this is fascinating! I'm really into this! It seems like it was built in very small numbers unfortunately, but I would love to borrow a 6x3 mamiya someday and shoot a few rolls!
Things to look for when in a Dutch thrift store... hahaha

skylight1b · Jul 1, 2024

fabulousrice said:
Interesting! I had no idea this one existed! You may want to try a Bencini Koroll 24S (I actually have one to sell) but the window they designed is only 4.5x3 so you may want to put your own cardboard mask in there. I don't think you would be able to use the Isolette L today? They make it sound like if you use a type of film with the wrong design on the backing paper you would be lost as to what needs to show in the window for you to stop advancing.

I am super interested and let me know or come back to post on this thread for any 6x3 findings!

The Isolette L definitely would be an Ilford only camera unless one could figure out a solution for others. Although, I'm wondering if Lomo color films would work. I don't remember what the backing paper is like on them.

OAPOli · Jul 1, 2024

fabulousrice said:
WOW this is so cool! I would love to learn more - did you document your process? What frame size did you get in the end?

Here's how I did it. Removed the gear and put a spacer. Attached the spring-loaded notched arm with a piece of copper wire. Added half frame marks on the counter (you need to eyeball it to the reference dot). The mask snaps on the body, 22x55mm size. Hasselblad manufactured a similar "6x3" mask.

Donald Qualls · Jul 2, 2024

fabulousrice said:
Bencini Koroll 24S (I actually have one to sell) but the window they designed is only 4.5x3

I have one of these cameras. I presume the reason for the frame size is so the resulting film could be mounted in 2x2 slide frames (like 4x4 on 127). Also, it's the same aspect ratio as regular 35 mm, but 25% larger each way.

Too bad the lens and shutter don't really do justice to slide film (but then there were a lot of cheap cameras that were labeled for slide film back in the day).

fabulousrice · Jul 18, 2024

Donald Qualls said:
I have one of these cameras. I presume the reason for the frame size is so the resulting film could be mounted in 2x2 slide frames (like 4x4 on 127). Also, it's the same aspect ratio as regular 35 mm, but 25% larger each way.

Too bad the lens and shutter don't really do justice to slide film (but then there were a lot of cheap cameras that were labeled for slide film back in the day).

Yes it's just silly to me to block out light and waste exposable areas of the film. The more area you expose, the more options you have should you want to crop later on! It is what it is

xya · Jul 19, 2024

I second the Isolette L. It's all there, the masks, the finder mask and with Ilford film you even have the stops on the backing paper https://www.120folder.com/agfa_isolette_l.htm

Modifying a folding camera to turn it into a 6x3 "half-frame" medium format camera

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