After a great deal of fretting and research, forgetting all that and a late-night eBay click, I’ve bought. a Hasselblad 500cm & a Leaf Aptus 8-II digital back.
I was in Edinburgh on the Royal Mile when I saw my first medium format camera - someone was walking along with a Mamiya RZ67 taking photos of various performers handing out leaflets as they do during the fest. I was fascinated and they let me look through the waist level viewfinder - it was like the world was being lit up inside a little box in my hands. That little sense of magic has never left me. I love the form factor of these cameras. Thats why, despite the ridiculous cost, I’ve bought one.
Shortly after that experience, I bought a 1932 Rollieflex Automat f3.5 which I’ve owned for about 16 years! And I haven’t put a great many rolls through it in that time. After bad rolls, mechanical failures, bad pictures, missed moments - I worked out that each usable shot (Maybe 3 of every 12 on a roll) cost about £6 a go. Back in 2010, factoring in buying a roll and develop and print, it was £1.50 per shot and now in 2022 it’s coming up to about £3. That constant cost pressure always put me off - and I had a Sony 6300, Canon 5D, Sony A7iii, and loads and loads of 35mm cameras in between then and now.
After a load of very lucrative work, I wanted to treat myself to something special that would let me do some more portraiture, creative projects and explore making prints. I was looking at a Fuji 50R for a time, having really enjoying using my Fuji X100V. I came very very close. Then I made this post on DPReview and actually tried the camera in a shop in London and it steered me towards paying more money and getting this Hasselblad setup.
The 50R is lovely, but a bit too light in the hand. Medium Format shouldn’t be quick or particularly easy, it should be slower. Also - in terms of cost, the body was £2k used, but any lens worth getting was the same again. So in many ways, the Hasselblad setup has SAVED me money…. on that huge cost saving…
Kit
Hasselblad 500c/m (1974)
Zeiss Plannar 80mm f2.8 (1974)
2 x A12 Film Backs
Hasselblad Knob with Exposure Meter
Leaf Aptus 8-II 645 Digital Back (2010)
£1700 for the Hasselblad kit, £1700 for the Leaf - bought in December 2021.
First Impressions - Testing
Initial findings - I’m figuring out the system, and I love it, but I’m very sure need to send it off for a service.
First thing I did was run a roll of film through both camera backs, a roll of HP5 and a roll of Fuji 400. The frame counters fell out of sync after the first frame on both, sometimes I could wind the camera knob and it would sync up again, but 50% of the time it didn’t. So I had some very very strange results.
500cm | Pro400 | Dec 2021 | First frame was this very cool self-portrait
500cm | Pro400 | Dec 2021 | Very present light leak
500cm | Pro400 | Dec 2021 | Consistent light leak and multiple exposures
500cm | HP5 | Dec 2021 | Different back. Less light leak, same problem with multiple exposures.
500cm | HP5 | Dec 2021 | Nephew. A picture riddled with a load of tech issues but… to me it shows the potential promise of the camera.
This could be a spring in the backs having lost some tension (likely), or the gear system on the body.
I took the darkslide out of one of the backs and the light seals came out with it… so that definitely needs a look at.
The mirror has begun to lock up very slowly and then wait sometimes up to two seconds before setting off the leaf shutter. Gets worse in the cold. Gets slower with the digital back on for some reason….
The mirror gets covered with dust from somewhere in the camera every time it comes back down. I have set it off and cleaned it perhaps 50 times, and cleaned and recleaned, but the dust keeps coming from somewhere inside the camera.
I honestly thought the exposure knob was going to be a bit useless, but it’s an excellent gadget and accurate in its own way.
I think all of this can be expected from a 48 year old camera - so I’m going to enjoy it for a week or so and then send it off for some love.
The Leaf Aptus 8-II
I couldn’t find a great deal of information about this particular system aside from articles about its release back in 2010. It took a while to arrive as the seller needed to buy a new backplate for it - it had sat on one of his studio cameras for 10 years. It' is fantastic and honestly, just works.
I don’t use Capture One very proficiently, but I have it - and it works so so so well with the files coming off this. It’s comparable to working with Fuji simulations. It’s seamless and quick and takes me a few minutes to make minor adjustments and export JPEGs. I suppose this is what you should expect from something that once cost £13k and I’m getting now for 1/10th of the price.
645 format is really fun to work with. I was considering a Mamiya RB67 for a while and I basically have a mini one with this system - you can turn the back from landscape to portrait by removing it, turning it 90* and popping it back on, the system works everything else out automatically. I found some templates online which you can print on transparent paper and have a makeshift frame line guide to place on top of your ground glass. It’s not very Hasselblad in quality but for testing and getting going, it’s great.
In the short term, the back lets me get going and see some pictures quickly out of the camera - it’s also really bloody cool. It puts any buyers remorse for the 50R completely to rest, it’s basically a 50R as a back, but I get to keep the form factor of a Hasselblad 500cm.
In the long-term I’ll be getting the backs fixed and using the digit back as a casual use thing or as a polaroid tester - get my settings and everything right and then put on a film back for “the real thing”.
Hasselblad Future
This wasn’t a casual buying experience, I own a lot of professional kit but this is a very personal investment so I did a great deal of research and testing before going ahead. And the key to the final purchase was the history and the future of Hasselblad.
Tech cycles are getting faster and faster as digital systems advance in ability and quality at an incredible pace. Once you could buy a camera for 20 years of work, now it’s more like 5 and even less if you’re really trying to stay at the very top of the technology tree. Sadly, the journey from a camera being the new shiny toy to a door-stop is becoming shorter and shorter. And companies build in obscelensance. They want you buy Version 2, so V1 is designed to fail at some point.
The 50R is amazing, but it will become obsolete much faster than the Hasselblad, not just because it’s a new camera, but because it isn’t modular. One day, not far away, 50R owners are going to have to upgrade if they want a high-end look that competes with the medium format sensors and tech and nonsense that’s coming out in the next 10 years. The same can’t be said of the Hasselblad, or at least, not of the whole system.
With this setup I get to enjoy film while I can and I quickly switch to digital whenever I like.
Film might stop (not stop, but become so specialist as to make it entirely unappealing) but digital film backs mean this camera can survive. The thing that finally sold me on the Hassel was the amount of “afforable” used backs as well as the new CFV50-II, alongside Hasselblad being bought by DJI and DJI continuing to bring out systems that remain compatible with the V series. It has a future.
And the final factor - form.
Form Factor
I remember some things really clearly, the particular click of the play button on my home video player, the way an Olympus 50mm lens turns (my mums camera when I was little), and the first time I looked through a waist-level viewfinder and saw the world held inside. Everything I said about the 50R might be entirely wrong, my main bias is; I love this format. It’s not just about the pictures a camera takes, there’s so much to be said about the way a camera takes pictures.
There’s a great Terry Pratchett concept - a magician is someone who knows how the trick is done and still thinks it’s magic. I think about that all the time when I’m trying to explain why I’m so obsessed with camera systems.
Things I’m going to buy / do to make the camera work:
Get the highly recommended B&H Focussing Screen
Send off for a good recommended Hasselblad Repair in the UK
I already bought a years worth of film!
Recommends and resources
The very helpful thread on DPReview where I asked initially about my decision
This really useful background on the Hasselblad 500CM series video
50 Portraits by Gregory Heisler to make you want to buy the largest possible format you can
Wish me luck.