The Panoramic Magic of @rimmytimfpv's 3D Printed Camera

Film photography is as much about the journey as it is the result. The heart of the craft isn’t the final images, but the sometimes long and daunting process that brought those images to life. Along the way, our beloved gear becomes its very own storyteller too — keeping traces of our progress throughout time. Some cameras are passed down and some are bought, while others are printed into existence.

In this interview, 30-year-old audio engineer and photography hobbyist Daniel Maurer (@rimmytimfpv) shares how his curious nature led him to 3D print a fully functioning 6x17 panoramic camera, detailing the trials and errors before his first successful shot.

Hi Daniel, welcome to the magazine! Can you share a bit about yourself and your journey to discovering film photography?

Thanks! My name is Daniel, I’m an audio engineer by day, and a tinkerer and hobbyist by passion.

I was encouraged to dive into film photography after Destin Sandlin from 'SmarterEveryDay' spoke fondly of his experiences shooting film. He had released a series of videos on how Kodak produces film, and a video where he tours Kamera Store’s headquarters in Helsinki, Finland. It was after seeing the process of taking old gear and restoring it to use for making memories and art that I decided to jump in. I quickly picked up my first camera, a Minolta Dynax 7000i SLR with autofocus and access to a wide variety of lenses. It was less than $100 for a camera and 2 lenses, and my newfound addiction was taking off.

I was endlessly fascinated by the way you can use chemistry and light to create such amazing art. And to really seal the deal, the whole process being facilitated by a meticulously designed mechanism that is expected to perform at a highly precise and highly consistent rate was the cherry on top for my nerdy brain.

I had been around cameras long enough — going as far back as my time in school — so while I already understood the basics of the exposure triangle, I was a complete novice with the ways that film handles light as well as how to work with gear that ranges from 20 to 60+ years old. I still consider myself an amateur photographer. I’ve only been shooting film for about a year, but I think it is a skill I will use for the rest of my life, so I’m excited to get more practice!

Please walk us through the technical process of making your 3D printed camera. How did the idea come about and what was the building experience like for you?

As I was discovering film photography last year, I began learning about the various film formats. One format kept coming back up with a few creators that I especially liked. 6x17 panoramas seemed like the coolest thing to me; a perfect merger between large format, and yet, so much more approachable because it uses 120 roll film, which is easier to buy and get developed locally. I began researching how to get into 6x17, and I quickly realized that any camera I could buy off the shelf to make 6x17 panoramas was going to cost several thousand dollars — and that was several thousand dollars I did not have.

When I discovered that some people are 3D printing 6x17 cameras, I turned all my attention and research towards figuring out how to do that. I shopped for a lot of options that might have taken less effort, some involving the designer printing the parts for me, but I was in full cost savings mode and wanted to print something myself. Eventually, I found the open-source project that I ended up using.

Unfortunately, this project doesn’t come with any instructions, and so a lot of the process was just figuring out how to turn these plastic bits into a functioning camera — especially one without light leaks. I started printing parts in July, and at that point, I didn’t own a lens for it and I didn’t have a clue how I was supposed to mount a lens to the parts I was printing. After many failed prints, I finally had a full camera body. In November, I ordered myself a lens. The project requires a large format lens with the shutter mechanism built in. The lens-cone piece of the 3D model has to be adjusted to match the focal plane of the lens you intend to use, so a small part of the process involved me downloading Fusion360, and making some basic adjustments to the open-source files. The result is a properly calibrated focus range! So, now, the end of my helicoid’s range is actually infinity focus! The lens itself, along with the helicoid, are the only non 3D printed parts of the camera other than some screws and nuts to hold everything together.

What prior experience did you have with 3D printing before working on this project?

I had been buying and using 3D printed parts for seven years, and had owned a 3D printer for nearly four years prior to starting this project. Most of the things I had been printing were single pieces to bolt onto a purchased piece, usually just for mounting accessories to existing tools. I didn’t have much experience printing entire projects that came in multiple pieces and required a lot of finishing and assembly, so those aspects of this project were new to me. I also had limited experience printing with ABS material, which is what I used for this project. My printer is pretty standard, and so I had to make a couple upgrades to make that possible. While the camera was definitely a daunting project, none of the individual parts were too complex for me to print, even if some of them took a couple tries.

What kind of challenges and learning moments came up when you were building the gear and shooting with it?

While building the camera, the biggest problem I had was with the biggest and longest prints. Some of the individual pieces of the camera took more than 48 hours to print, and any hiccups through that entire time would likely mean I had to restart that whole piece. I experienced the print warping off of the print bed due to uneven cooling of the plastic several times. As a result, I had to attempt to print these biggest pieces as many as five or six times before I got it right, and each failure prior to that used up quite a bit of printer filament before the failure happened.

After the camera was fully assembled, it took around a dozen rolls of film to figure out where all the light leaks were coming from. It turns out that my lensboard was the biggest culprit. Through the process of tracking that issue down, I taped over the frame counter window and learned how to count my frames blind. It took even more rolls of testing after figuring out light leaks to learn what my focal range is for this camera. I was able to use a ground glass and measure some basic estimated guides using that, but again, because the project didn’t come with any instructions, I messed it up without knowing. I later learned that I had mounted the ground glass to its frame incorrectly, and therefore my ground glass was around 2mm offset from where the film plane was when I swapped out for the film back. This led to many more frames [being] out of focus before I resolved that issue.

Tell us about your first successful photo using this camera.

My first successful photo with the camera was very exciting, but I was far from nailing every shot consistently. My first successful photo was the only photo on its roll worth anything.

It turns out, I only got anything in focus by accident. I was still using my incorrectly calibrated focus ring, and I was still pretty bad at accurately advancing my frames. I was also still only shooting black and white film so I could develop it at home in a Paterson tank and work through issues and iterations much faster than if I had to wait for lab development. The use of black and white film with a home developer made the trial and error process much more enjoyable to me. I could go shoot, and see the results the same day sometimes!

I was mostly shooting duds, and so I hadn’t even figured out how I was going to scan these giant negatives yet and was just looking at them on a light table, or doing a basic scan and conversion with a digital camera handheld above the light table. After all that work, the first successful photo wasn’t even of anything interesting. Previously, I had driven out to shoot some test shots at unique landscape or architectural locations, but I ended up making my first successful shot just a few blocks from my front door.

How do you approach composition and framing when working with a panoramic frame?

This is probably one of the hardest parts of my work flow even after months of working with the camera successfully. I have a ground glass that I can use for framing and composition, but I do not yet have a functional darkslide to swap in the ground glass between shots on the same roll. As a result, framing within the same roll is a lot of guesswork. One of the advantages to shooting such a wide format is that I can leave enough room for a little bit of cropping in post and achieve my most desired framing later. A lot of composition is done with the viewfinder app on my phone, where I have a specific preset for 6x17 format through a 125mm lens, and the accuracy is really good unless you are trying to photograph something very close to the camera. For landscapes the difference is negligible. For portraits (usually done as a vertical pano) and other work, I really want to get a functional darkslide to allow me to use the ground glass between every frame.

How does shooting with your homemade camera differ from shooting with your other gear?

The homemade camera requires a much slower process. I have literally written down a 10-step checklist in Sharpie on the back of the camera so I make sure I don’t forget to advance the film before making another exposure, or, god forbid, after finishing with the ground glass and loading the film, I accidentally leave the lens open and fully ruin the first frame of that roll. I have already made every imaginable mistake with this camera, which was a great learning process, but even after learning 99 ways to not use this camera, I still like to check myself against a physical checklist to ensure I’m doing it right. Shooting with some of my other film cameras I am often much more focused on being engaged with my subject on a human level, and I leave the camera by my side until the last possible moment when I actually take the photo. With my 3D printed camera, it's almost always on a tripod, and the camera is taking as much of my attention as the scene I am composing.

Do you have any favorites from the project? Are there any images that stand out to you as especially meaningful or technically impressive?

I have a few frames that I am really proud of, but overall, the camera is still so new to me, I’m sure my best work is stuff that I will be making with it over the next year or two.

So far my favorite shots are the two I took at sunset looking at Blanca Peak and a hay barn. It was my first time putting slide film into my 3D printed camera, and I really love looking at that big film transparency! Metering for fading light and calculating reciprocity when shooting at f/32, ISO 100 was a challenge on its own, but I’m so thrilled with how the exposure turned out, and the colors in the film blew my expectations out of the water!

A couple more technically challenging shots are with almost the same setup, E100, f/32, but instead of fading light, I decided to go shooting some gas stations at night! I only overexposed my first shot on the roll, but got 3 good shots, properly exposed, with exposure times ranging from 20 seconds to 95 seconds.

What tips or advice would you give to anyone who wants to experiment with 3D printing their own camera?

Do your research and planning before you start printing or buying anything! There are lots of printable projects out there, in 35 mm, 35 mm panos, 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 6x12, 6x17, 6x24, and there are at least two 3D printable large format 4x5 projects that I’m aware of. Figure out what you need out of a camera before diving into a project like this because most of the 3D camera designs I’ve come across don’t have a solution for light metering, or accurate focusing, or accurate framing. Plenty of professionally produced cameras also use zone focusing, or an external viewfinder, but these are limitations that are a lot harder to solve when the camera is homemade.

Once you find a project that you are certain meets your needs, start putting together a shopping list. Every camera I have looked at printing requires at a bare minimum some nuts and bolts to hold the body together, and almost always requires you to purchase a separate lens. Some cameras have a much longer parts list, with electronics and mirrors and screens to create an electronic rangefinder experience. Make sure these design elements are within your budget, and also within your skill set to put it together.

What other creative projects do you have lined up for the future?

Right now, I’m planning on printing a 6x12 camera because I believe the 125mm lens on my 6x17 will look better on a slightly smaller format, but that should be fairly simple since its design is a part of the same open source repository as the 6x17 camera I have already made.

The real answer is that my next 3D printed camera is going to be the MRF: a LIDAR powered, lens coupled, multi-format, medium format rangefinder — similar to a Mamiya7. It takes Mamiya press lenses, which are easy to acquire for relatively low cost, and uses electronics to provide light metering information as well as LIDAR powered rangefinding for setting focus. The design took inspiration from the Holmium cameras designed by Panomicron, but without a published version of that design, this camera seems to bring a lot to the table, both with creative design elements as well as a decently written set of instructions for how to put one together.

If you want to follow Daniel's journey experimenting with 3D printed cameras, check out his LomoHome and Instagram!

written by francinegaebriele on 2025-05-22 #culture #people #diy #medium-format #experimental #panoramic #homemade-camera #3d-printed-camera Share Article