Hasselhoff

I'm on Instagram but I don't post much (a bit like this blog, but my intention is to do more) and therefore do not have many followers, but that doesn't worry me. However the other day I posted a picture of my old Hasselblad film camera, and I got the most responses out of all my posts. Partly I'm sure because I mentioned and therefore hash tagged that as my Hasselblad was out did that make me Hasselhoff! But I think the main interest was simply the Hasselblad camera and the idea of still using it.  Someone from Russia asked me how much film costs here. Turns out it's cheaper for a roll of TriX 120 in Russia than it is here.

Screenshot of Hasselhoff Instagram post
56 likes is lots for me

As I consequence of this post and a landscape photo I also posted from the Hasselblad, I now have more followers, even the Hasselblad site are now a follower of mine. There is something about the look of a picture on 120 film taken with the Hasselblad that looks so different to anything else. The Zeiss 80mm lens I use is wonderful, it seems to gather the light in a particular way. It's sharp but not too sharp, hard to explain really. Also the 120 format does wonderful things with the out of focus areas.

As I've said in an earlier post, it's not the easiest of cameras to use though. It's heavy, it's slow, it has no meter, (you can get a metered viewfinder but it adds to the weight and is so expensive) and for me the hardest thing of all is that because I need to wear glasses its really hard to focus. But maybe for all these reasons, it slows me down and therefore makes me produce a particular kind of picture I wouldn't otherwise.

View from the Church in Freshford

Take this picture above for instance. The camera had to be put on a tripod. It was snowing, my hands were freezing, I said to myself, just take a phone picture or use the digital, but I feel the result would have been very different, and although it's hard to see on a computer screen, there is a certain quality to this which I just love. A friend of mine some time ago told me to sell the Hasselblad. I won't be doing that anytime soon.