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:

A digital Hasselblad

It is exactly 1 week since I got a new camera whoooo

Now I need to make a confession- I like cameras, I like everything to do with cameras, I like new kit, lenses, lights, tripods, I mean i even get excited about a new lens cloth so when I finally got a chance to buy a Hassy I got very excited to say the least!

Now this particular camera is more than just another camera for me, since i first started taking images Hasselblad as a company represented the very best in camera systems and I never thought I would actually be able to shoot with one yet alone own one. It was something to strive towards and hope one day to borrow!

So after many years I finally have one! Now its not the newest version (aka the £30k version!!) but its still EPIC!!! And here are a few example images whooooooo:

So to begin with was an epic journey to ffordes photographic just outside Inverness a short 6 hour round trip!!!!

And I ended up with this: 

And this is next to my canon 7dmk2:

And here are a few images from the camera, they have been tweaked in photoshop and lightroom: 

So basically this is the most fun camera I have ever worked with And I cannot wait to see what other epic shots I can get with it!!! Oh and to check out my other work go to: http://www.mattsphotosuk.com/

and if you dont want stills but want video check out MBP here: 

http://mbpltd.com/