Back in December my good friend Steve and I were admiring the beauty that is Hasselblad. A beautiful all mechanical film camera that shoots bigger negatives than 35mm. At almost four times the surface area and Carl Zeiss optics, it’s a guaranteed knock out in terms of image quality. Looking through the viewfinder, everything has a 3D look to it. Just by holding it in your hands, you know it’s something special, and it’s a classic camera that will stand the test of time.

I’ve only had the thing for 2 or so months, but it has already replaced my beloved Nikon D700 in my everyday camera bag. Even though the image quality of scanned film is not even close to the D700, it is still my preferred camera, flaws and all. I am ridiculously slow and meticulous, adjusting little settings and trying to get the focus nailed down, but it is so much fun. The new digital SLR bodies technology kind of takes the fun out of traditional photography. Your focus and exposure is wrapped up in half-press and full press, you can shoot bursts of 3-8 frames per second so you can shoot multiple compositions of the same picture very fast. You’ll get the job done in a matter of seconds, but what’s the fun in that?

The viewfinder in the Hasselblad is a waist level finder. You have to look down to see what you’re shooting. The really fun part is, left and right are backwards! It’s an uncorrected mirrored image you see because it doesn’t have a prism to correct it. Trying to move the frame to the left means you have to move the camera to the right, a lot of fun! Larger 4×5 and 8×10 view cameras are even more fun, the image is upside down! I don’t know why, but I like how it really slows you down because you have to think hard on composition. I also like that film is expensive to shoot – the cost of film, development, and 4×4 prints costs about $12, or $1 per shot. Can you imagine handing someone $1 every time you take a shot? It gets expensive fast, so each frame takes super long to shoot!

The images it produces are wonderful though, something that you can’t reproduce with a 35mm format camera. The Carl Zeiss optics combined with the large film surface area gives it a very unique look. The bokeh has a certain signature to it, and the overall grain structure and color of film gives it a lot of character. I’m still experimenting with different types of film, and I will likely shoot Kodak T-Max, Tri-X, and Portra exclusively. I have a pack of Velvia but the exposure is so hard to get right, and developing is expensive! Apparently not many labs do E-6 anymore.

Here are a few pictures that I shot and scanned recently:

Penny looking cute!

Good friends Barry and Meredith

The famed Portland sign in downtown.

The top of Multnomah Falls, still trying to get a hang of black and white!

Do you see the difference in image quality between film and digital? The one thing I’ve noticed is the transition of colors is a lot more natural with film. When digital sensors get blown out with white, it usually has a really ugly transition to pure white where one of the red, green, blue channels aren’t even. It may not matter in black and white as much, but it is pretty noticeable in color.

If you would like to have your portraits taken with medium format film before Kodak stops producing them in the next 2 years or so, let me know