showreel

Thursday 20 April 2017

6 months with my Hasselblad h4d

I've now had my Hasselblad for 6 months and I thought I would write up a few observations about it. To start - I have pretty much my whole life wanted a Hasselblad I would say I do have mild GAS (gear acquisition syndrom) in the lightest most un-serious way!  having said that i did just clear out my collection of totally broken unusable cameras (about 15) which i really didn't want to throw away but couldn't be bothered to fix as they were pretty much in an horrific state! Thats not including the 40 something actual working cameras I have but anyway...

So I obviously want the Hasselblad h6d but didnt have £35k to spend so I ended up getting the h4d 40 with an 80m lens and 2 batteries within the budget I had.

There are many reasons why I wanted a Hasselblad but the main one was the fact that you get a medium format look from a medium format camera and its impossible to replicate that with a dslr and I had a lot of misses with my film hassy so was keen to look at the digital options.

And it hasn't disappointed - its had its issues of which I will tell you about now!

1- Battery life when not tethered is horrific - especially on location and in the cold.

2- Random failures - so i've come from the canon dslr world where you just shoot - and keep on shooting with the hassleblad, stuff fails regularly, lens errors, back errors, battery errors, pretty much every kind of error you could think of happens.

3- Cost its a high end camera so EVERYTHING is expensive, lenses,extra batteries and most worryingly - servicing and repairs - if anything goes wrong it is not going to be cheap or fast to repair.

4- tethering - it was initially a nightmare - Im on a macbook pro and it took alot of troubleshooting to get everything talking to each other.

5- speed - using a medium format digital camera is not fast - its slow everything is much much slower than i was used to and it takes alot to get used too.

And now the positives:

1- so people always say that the equipment doesn't make you a better photographer - and I 100% agree with this BUT the type of images I can now create, the depth, the sharpness the file size and the dynamic range that can be achieved with this camera kicks the crap out of everything else ive ever shot on. which in turn allows me to create images more closely to what i imagined than ever before.

2- colour rendition - the skin tones are incredible

3- its sooo sharp

4- It's slower (i know i said this was a negative but) - you are forced to LOOK to observe the light to think more about what you are doing which is a great thing!

5- I love it - i like using it i want to go out and shoot on it all the time - which is a great feeling

6- I does take the best image out of any camera i have ever used.

So there you go!

Here are some examples:











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