Would you like to get higher resolution than medium format out of your regular APS-C or full frame camera? The Fotodiox Rhinocam lets you do just that, and for not much money. With the Rhinocam you mount a medium format lens on your camera, then shift the camera around on the adapter, taking up to 8 photos. Afterwards you stitch the photos together in software to get one super high-resolution image. It’s different from regular panorama stitching, since the point of view stays the same and there’s no distortion. It’s a relatively cheap solution (the Rhinocam currently costs around $200), and some older medium format lenses are absolute bargains right now. Plus, using old medium format lenses is fun!
What you get
Here’s what you get when you buy the Rhinocam:
- The Rhinocam adapter itself, available for Canon, Nikon, Sony and Fuji X mount (the one I tested).
- A lens mount: Mamiya 645, Hasselblad V or Pentax 645. You can buy additional lens mounts later and swap them on the Rhinocam.
- A black case for the Rhinocam.
What you’ll also need:
- A matching medium format lens.
- Personally I like the Mamiya 645 lenses. They’re among the sharpest (check out my big medium format lens test) and they’re cheap. For example, the Mamiya 80mm f2.8 goes for around $130 and is one of the sharpest lenses you can get.
- In other reviews, people complained about vignetting with 645 lenses and recommended 6×7 lenses instead. I tried that with a Pentax 645 to Pentax 6×7 adapter, but the Pentax 6×7 lens was a lot less sharp, had heavy chromatic aberration, and I didn’t like the colors.
- The crop factor is approximately 0.53 (according to the Wolfcrow blog), so an 80mm lens behaves like a 42mm on full frame.
- A sturdy tripod – it’s a heavy setup, so you’re going to need a good tripod with a good ball head.
How to shoot it
- Set up your tripod and mount the Rhinocam with the lens and camera.
- You can slide the camera all the way to the side, which lets you frame the shot by looking through a window, like on the old large format cameras. You’ll need extra light, so open up your lens aperture, frame the shot and focus the lens.
- There are two modes: panorama (a wide shot made of 4 images) or 645 (a squarer shot made of 8 images, which is the only mode I used).
- Depending on the mode, you line the camera up with the dots on the back, take a photo, move it to the next dot, take a photo, and repeat until all the photos are taken.
- You’ll probably want to use manual camera settings so every frame gets the same exposure.
How to edit it
Now you have the photos (in my case 8) and need to stitch them together. You can almost just place the photos next to each other in Photoshop and save, but for most images that won’t work, because there’s a slight lens distortion.
Luckily there are lots of panorama merge tools out there. The problem is that they’re designed for heavily distorted photos taken with a normal lens while changing the point of view. It still works, but it can make the process a bit harder. Here are the tools I used:
- Photoshop Photomerge or Camera Raw/Lightroom’s Panorama Merge – They might work or they might not, and if they don’t, there’s nothing you can tweak. But I’d still recommend trying them first, since they’re easy.
- Merging manually in Photoshop – As mentioned, you could do the merging yourself: import each image as a layer and mask out the overlapping areas. But for images with a lot of connecting lines, this can be close to impossible. I don’t recommend it.
- PTGui Pro – A paid panorama merge tool with a lot of advanced features. I recommend it if Photoshop fails. Here are some tricks I found that made merging work better:
- Some people claim PTGui needs the lens focal length to calculate the panorama correctly. You can add the focal length either in camera or afterwards; I use ExifTool Gui for that.
- Turn on advanced options (on the Project Assistant tab).
- Don’t add too many control points – more doesn’t help.
- Use the mask feature – the layers overlap, so use it to decide which photo should be shown where. This is useful if you used a different focus for each photo, or if some lines have a hard time connecting.
- Try adding vertical/horizontal lines if the image won’t merge.
- Export to 16-bit TIFF.
- When you’re done, check the merged image for stitching errors. Then open it in your favorite editing program and finish the final image.
Tips and tricks
- The Rhinocam suits some subjects better than others: auto-aligning the layers can be hard if large areas of the frame are moving clouds.
- The Rhinocam is popular for scanning analog film in super high resolution, but I haven’t tried that yet.
- If you want even more detail, I recommend trying the “Super Resolution” technique: shoot 10–30 frames of the same scene, align the layers on top of each other in Photoshop, blend them and add sharpening. It removes noise and adds extra detail, but your subject can’t be moving. Read more about it on Ian Norman’s blog.
Conclusion
Pros:
- When it all works, the result is truly amazing! Of course it’s not as versatile or easy as a digital medium format camera, but for the cases where it works, it’s even better.
- It makes you slow down and think about what to shoot, kind of like analog film.
- Those old medium format lenses are amazing, and it’s so much fun discovering the world of old medium format gear. Many of the lenses are underpriced for what you get.
Cons:
- For me, the biggest problem is the merging process. Some photos are easy to merge, but others can be so hard that it’s almost not worth the effort. The solution is to learn the merging tools, but that takes time.
- It’s a big, heavy setup. You need a big backpack and a solid tripod, and you’ll look like an idiot while you put it all together. I’m okay with that, but it does make things more complicated.
- Not all landscape/cityscape photos are easy to shoot with the Rhinocam: photos with lots of moving clouds, water or people are hard for the software to merge. But as long as you understand the limitations, it’s not a problem.
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