Lomography Sprocket Rocket

By Jim Fisher

The Lomography Sprocket Rocket ($89.99 direct) ?is a fun 35mm film camera that shoots panoramic shots over the entirety of the film?including the sprocket area around the edges of the film. The camera delivers a panoramic perspective, about twice as wide as a standard camera, so you'll only get 18 shots on a 36-shot roll. It's a very fun toy camera, although you'll have to hunt around for a specialty processing lab or scan negatives yourself in order to digitize the sprocket area of the film.

Largely plastic in material, the camera is noticeably wide. There are two metal knobs on either side of its top?one to advance the film and the other to rewind it. The lens is manual focus, with indicators for focus on objects between 0.6 and 1 meter away, and for objects further away than a meter. There's also a shutter lever, a toggle switch to change between a standard 1/100-second shutter speed and bulb mode shooting (which keeps the shutter open as long as you hold the release down), and a switch to change adjust the lens aperture for sunny (f/16) or cloudy (f/11) shooting. There's also a hotshoe, so you can add an external flash for use indoors.

Once you've taken a shot, you'll need to turn the advance knob until you see a small white dot that indicates the film is advanced to the next frame. If you want to take a double exposure, just trip the shutter again?this can give you some very trippy results.

The 30mm lens offers a wider perspective than you'd expect from this focal length thanks to the wide format. The curved front element of the lens shows through in photos?there's significant distortion, producing an almost-fisheye effect that originates in the center of the frame.

Getting your film processed may be the biggest challenge you face with the Sprocket Rocket. While it's easy enough (for now) to walk into the local drug store and get a roll of 35mm film developed, one hour photo places aren't going to be able to scan the entirety of the negative, so you won't see the sprockets. If you have a flatbed scanner at home that supports scanning negatives, you can do it yourself. Lomography even sells the DigitalLIZA 135 Film Scanning Mask ($35) to hold your film in place for better scanning. If you're local to a Lomography Gallery Store, of which there are several in major cities around the world, you can take it there for scanning and processing.

The Sprocket Rocket isn't for everyone?you'll have to be open to shooting with a camera that doesn't use a memory card, has a pretty slow lens, and only offers one wide field of view. But the camera can give you some really cool results. Sure, you can add fake sprockets to your digital photos?but when a camera like the Sprocket Rocket exists, that just seems like cheating.

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