Part of the fun if photography is it gives you a different way of seeing the world. Depending on the lens or format or camera, you can experience your surroundings in a profoundly different way. Late last year, I rented a Hasselblad XPan with the aim of capturing my surroundings as a series of panoramas. I was aiming less for sweeping vistas—the usual usecase for the panorama—and more for something cinematic.

I used the camera in two places, primarily: Charlottesville, Virginia—where I live—and Birmingham, Alabama, where I was staying during a weeklong reporting trip. The XPan also saw some use in Washington DC, but not too much. There's not much to say about it as a camera. It's a bit heavy, but otherwise easy to handle. It's a rangefinder, which means you don't see the frame through the lens and have to use your imagination to get something of a sense of what the final image will look like. The focusing mechanism on the copy I used wasn't fully vertically aligned, which was only a problem for close focusing.

I shot 8 rolls of film on the camera, but rather than bore you with every photo I took, I figured I would do some curation, giving you the highlights. Let me know what you think in the comments.