Long Exposure with the Rhinocam Vertex

The RhinoCam Vertex is a technical adapter that helps you create a larger image than what your sensor can capture. The adapter allows you to rotate the compatible camera around the image circle of a lens bigger than the format of your sensor. Using this method, you can capture the sharpest parts of the lens. You, of course, have to stitch the images using editing software, and this is why the RhinoCam Vertex is one of our more advanced adapters to use.

You have to make sure that all four photos are exposed properly and there will be some guess work involved for composing. You also have to make sure your tripod setup lets you rotate the camera side without it bumping into this. You'll also want to expose for the brightness part of your scene, so be sure to rotate the adapter in live view. This does not stop the adapter from being practical and fun to use. Once the basics are mastered, you can move on to things such as long exposures! For this demo I even took a step further by pushing the setup with a fisheye lens.

For composition, I already knew what I wanted to photograph along the Chicago Riverwalk. As for my settings, I wanted to stay between F8 and F11 while maintaining a shutter speed slower than one second. Here is what the first round of stitching looks like:

In this demo I used the Nikon F 16mm F2.8D lens on an APS-C Fujifilm X-mount. The Nikon lens was designed to expose an image onto 35mm film and modern-day full-frame sensors. Using the APS-C Fujifilm sensor allows me to capture the image circle beyond what full frame is able to capture. If you look at the individual frames you can see how limited my scene is even when shooting with a wide angle lens!

When stitched together using editing software, you can see on the left is what the final stitch looks like. You expand the range while still having room to crop in where you want. Please note that this is on the extreme end of things. I do not recommend using a fisheye for this kind of stitch but the results can be interesting to say the least.

And here is another example of the setup using a one second shutter speed to capture the motion of people walking the streets:

And once again here is the final stitch versus the final edit:

This demo was a good opportunity to experiment with the RhinoCam Vertex. Perhaps my next demo will be pairing a vintage medium format lens to the Fujifilm GFX or even a Canon EOS film camera - Perhaps Nikon F! The whole point of this demo is to push myself and technical know-how. If you're into adapting and have the parts laying around, check out our full RhinoCam Vertex collection here!