Before you get too excited, this isn't a post about food, or even food photography (although that would make for a good post :) ). The title of this post came about as I was thinking of a way to explain what it's like to shoot with the Hasselblad. It occured to me that photography with the Hasselblad is like eating rice with chopsticks. It can be incredibly annoying at first, but with practice, it becomes second nature. Now having said that, I must admit that shooting with the Hasselblad isn't second nature to me yet - I've only put 6 or 7 rolls of film through the camera. To make things a little easier for myself, I first take a picture with my digital SLR, a Nikon D90. This gives me the correct shutter speed and aperture, and if I'm not sure of a given composition, I preview the photo on the D90's LCD screen. Back in the day, medium format photographers did something similar using polaroid film.
Here are a few of my recent shots from an afternoon that I spent walking around Georgetown a few weeks ago. These were all shot on Kodak Portra 400. Like Portra 160, this is a color negative film (also called print film). In my limited experience, I've found that I prefer the 400. The extra speed comes in handy, the grain appears to be the same as the 160, and the colors are a bit punchier. Portra is an awesome jack-of-all-trades film. It may not rival fuji velvia for landscapes, but for everything else, it looks great, and when you need to take people shots, the skin tones on Portra are the best there is (after all, that's what Portra was designed to do). I shoot Portra because it's the only 220 format film still being made, but also because it has the look that I want for 90% of my color pictures (and the B&W conversions look pretty good too!).
As usual, I've put my favorite picture first. You'll have to excuse the black band at the bottom of the image. My goal when shooting the Hasselblad is to never crop a picture in post. If you see the black band, which comes from scanning the film, then the picture hasn't been cropped at all.
This one graffitied corner near the Key Bridge seems at odds with the generally yuppified atmosphere of Georgetown, but it makes for some interesting photography. Pictures like this are the reason that I go to the trouble of shooting a Hasselblad. It's film, so the colors and the textures are vivid but still believable, and because it's medium format, the resolution is superb, even with print film. One day I'll get my Hasselblad set up to shoot slide film (also called positive film, or transparency) - the colors and the contrast of slide film are more vivid, and the resolution is better (less grain), but getting the correct exposure can be tricky because slide film doesn't have anywhere near the exposure latitude of print film. On a camera that doesn't have modern matric metering, it's very easy to under- or over-expose with slide film.
Here's another shot from the same location. Now that I think about it, this would make a great background for some portraits as well.
This is my favorite angle from which to capture the Key Bridge. That being said, I think this would make for a more interesting photo with a wide-angle lens. Alas, (for now) I have only one lens for my Hasselblad, an 80mm, which gives a normal perspective on medium format, similar to what a 50mm lens gives on full-frame (i.e. standard film SLR), and what a 35mm lens gives on most consumer digital SLR's (whose sensors are smaller than the film in a film SLR). It's all a bit confusing, but the take home is that I need a 50mm or 60mm lens to get a wide-angle shot on my Hasselblad.
Here's another, albeit less interesting, photo of some rowers crossing under the Key Bridge.
Again, I'm stuck with just one focal length, so I can't zoom in on the rowers as might be done with a point and shoot or an SLR. Luckily the Hasselblad has enough resolution that, if needed, we can crop way in to make the subject more central to the composition. The blurry bits on the side were added in snapseed. They're supposed to mimic the tilt and shift functions of a view-camera (which tilt and shift the plane of focus so that it is no longer perpendicular to the light entering the lens).
I should have entitled this post "how to deal with shooting a fixed focal length lens", because here is another shot where I couldn't get as wide as I wanted to with my 80mm lens. In this case, I was forced to turn the camera sideways in order to get as much of the subject into the frame as possible. I think it makes for a more interesting picture in this instance, although it would get old if I tilted every photo like this. IMHO, it works here because the composition is all about the interplay of shapes and basic primary colors, and with the smokestack tilted, it bisects the frame into two pseudo-symmetric halves. Some photographers like to talk about these compositional elements as if they were 100% planned before taking the photo, and perhaps that's true for some photographers. In my case, the compositional balance that came from tilting the camera was a happy accident.
This next pic is a bit boring, but I like it because it shows just how well film is able to capture the textures and feeling of a place or thing, which is something that I've always felt is lacking in digital photography. Again, that's just IMHO. This is the old astronomy observatory at Georgetown University.
The old observatory sits right next to a small koi fish pond. I'd gotten some nice pictures of water lillies and some other blooms there last summer. It was too early in the season to capture those again, but the pond still made for some nice shots. Because the corresponding focal lengths for medium format are all about twice as long as one would use for the same field of view on a film SLR, even when stopped down around f/5.6, it's easy to create some nice bokeh (which refers to the out-of-focus background, or technically speaking, the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus background).
And finally, here are some "macro" shots of spring blooms, all of which were taken using a +3 close-up diopter to allow for a closer minimum focus distance. Some of these were taken in Georgetown and some were taken around my apt. in Rockville, MD.
I believe this first one is a cherry blossom, although not one of the famous "sakura" blossoms that we have here in Wash DC.
Lastly, two hydrangea shots. One of these was shot at a shallow aperature (f/4, if memory serves), and one was shot stopped down around f/11. The background of the f/11 shot was later blurred using the tilt-shift tool in Snapseed. I'm including them both because it's tough to tell which one is the out-of-camera shot and which is the "fake" photo that I de-focused in snapseed. The Snapseed app is probably the best $20 I've spent in photography.
That's it for now. Unfortunately, I have no idea when my next post will be. My real life is going to be very busy for the next few months, but hopefully I can still find the time to burn a few rolls of film.
...until next time, thanks for reading my Hasselblog!
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