Hasselblad: A Camera That Went to the Moon and Changed How We See It
npr.org
npr.org
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums
Edit - a bonus with making paper prints (with an enlarger, I should also clarify) a side benefit is that photographic prints scan pretty well in ordinary documents scanners!
Not to mention the fact that the negative contains more dynamic range than the print, so often your dodging and burning the image to adjust.
Though I miss the magic of a photo appearing on a piece of paper when printing, I kinda don’t miss a lot about the process.
I continued to shoot slides on trips but it wasn't until I got into digital photography that I really fully got back into it.
once you’ve captured the negative digitally, you can use editing apps to flip the curve to obtain a photo positive.
I found that those things mostly just stressed me out. I'd be much happier paying a hundred bucks a month for access to a darkroom where I didn't have to worry about those things and could just enjoy the process of developing and printing.
I've never been more than a casual photographer, so figuring out how to run a darkroom by myself and how to make enough use of it to be worth my while were too big a hump to get myself over.
I love the magic of watching prints develop and even the smell of a darkroom, but truth be told, getting a full-frame digital camera recently (a Sony a7ii) that I can put my old lenses (screw mount Takumars and Pentax M primes, one Pentax A zoom) on has done more to rekindle the joy in photography for me than anything.
The Takumars, in particular, are maybe the most beautifully made things I own. Oh my god, the knurling of the focus and aperture rings is unbelievable. The action of the focus helicoid is divine. We will never see lenses made the likes of them again because the machining costs alone would probably double the price of the lenses and the beautiful action of the focus helicoid is probably completely at odds with fast autofocus.
I will concede that from an optics and coatings standpoint, the world has moved on in the last 50 years. And obviously autofocus is a thing now. But I'm not a good enough photographer to be hitting the limits of my lenses, and for me part of the joy is the way they feel in my hands.
That said, I almost bought an FM3a after college just to support the complete lunacy of building them new. At that point, I didn't really have enough Pentax lenses to be wedded to the system. I still kind of wish I had.
You got me thinking though: since you can adapt basically anything to E-mount, the cost of trying out another line of lenses is now down to <$100 US (cost of adapter), at least for manual focus and aperture lenses. A well-designed mirrorless mount and adapter basically renders the concept of a photographic system obsolete.
For those unfamiliar, the key dimensions on a mount are the flange distance (distance from the plane of the mount to the plane of the film), and diameter. There are two things to know about flange distance:
1) It used to be "large" (45mm give or take a few) to allow for room for the mirror in a DSLR to swing upwards.
2) You can't adapt a lens with a smaller flange distance on a body that has a larger flange distance. Well, you can, but you use infinity focus.
Because mirrorless cameras don't have a mirror (go figure), they're freed from constraint 1, and can make the flange distance as short as they care to, basically letting them eliminate the issue of 2.
Adapters used to be awkward, at best, (nonexistent at worst) because they would have to adapt two mounts of fundamentally similar diameters without having a lot (any?) room to move the lens along its axis.
Adapters for a mirrorless body can offset the lens tens of millimeters along its axis from the body flange, leaving plenty of room to resolve any mechanical incompatibilities in the mounts.
And the mirrorless bodies have really led to adapter heaven!
Use a rocket or canned air to keep the dust off, and a sheet of anti-newton glass to keep the film flat and focused while scanning.
Developing B&W at home is economical if you use a shelf-stable developer (I like Kodak HC-110, a half-open bottle keeps for years) and fixer (Ilford Rapid). Per-roll developing cost is between 50¢ and $1.
I shoot a few rolls and throw them in a big Paterson tank. Two rolls of film take 30 min to develop and 15 min to scan. Not much longer than the time to drive round trip to the photo lab.
No darkroom necessary- I load film in a dark bag. Post-process the scans in Lightroom or Darktable. Batch-processing means it's pretty fast. If I want to make prints, either I send out the digital positive to ProDPI or I rent time at the community darkroom.
A 4x5" negative takes 33 minutes to scan with 2400 dpi. In this time I can make several photos and stitch them together do some spot removal and will get a better quality.
[0] https://www.filmscanner.info/EpsonPerfectionV700Photo.html
One problem with many flatbed scanners (not all of them and not the film scanners) is that they illuminate the film/object from the same side as the sensor, so the light has to travel and bounce more, creating more chances of stray light.
I’m sure you can get well focused results in this way, it it sounds like you are throwing away most of your resolution. Am I missing something? Are you stitching I ages together? If so how are you managing positioning?
If I haven’t missed something: if you compared this to a digital back on a ’blad with otherwise the same image and blew them up I expect the difference would be blindingly obvious.
I would be really interested in hearing more about this (noob in this area). Are you saying the old Nikon / Canon lenses from 90s are a bad choice for modern DSLRs from these companies, or did I completely misunderstand you? If so, why is that?
Using an older lens with a camera sporting a 20+ MP sensor will give you less sharp results than a similar new lens. But the image will be no worse than that old lens shooting film. And the lens will be much cheaper!
If you (or others) like the results, the technical details do not matter.
If a digital SLR and a light table can get you enough resolution for what you want to use the images for though, that's fine. You could use that for most of your images and then get the ones you want to print really large professionally scanned later.
The selling point of bigger sensors now is that they don't need ideal conditions.
A top spec Epson flatbed+negative scanner will cost you in the region of $500. This will allow you to scan medium format film at a quality more than adequate for web stuff and also for printing up to 50x50cm.
Film costs are now in the region of $7 per roll for quality B&W and $15 per roll for quality colour. That's good stuff by the likes of Ilford and Kodak.
Development of B&W is trivial to do at home, and will cost you around $3 per roll. You can economise by reusing chemicals or by doubling up (two rolls in a tank for example) to bring this down to $1 per roll. Chemicals will last in the region of one year if stored in air tight light proof containers.
Development of colour is slightly more involved but can still be done for around $5 per roll.
Printing is where the expense comes at you. Depending on paper, sizes, inks, etc, this can set you back anything from $5 per print for a cheap mass-market lab style print for 20x20cm, to $30 if the inks/paper are better.
All in all I don't think it's that much more expensive than using a digital camera. You shoot less, you shoot different photos, you see different things. I average around 50 rolls per year through my Hasselblad.
FWIW I wrote about my experiences with Hasselblad cameras a couple of years ago : https://leejo.github.io/2017/03/08/ten_years_with_a_hasselbl...
It looks like you cut your teeth a little bit later than my generation. When we were shooting, digital was just dawning, and all of us couldn’t wait to stop paying for film and processing. I was talking to Grant not long ago, and he said Transworld spent about 400k on film servicing. We hated film servicing so much that we even settled for the sub-par digital bodies (1D anyone?) with no steroid crops.
Anyhow - ever since I bought digital, I couldn’t ever understand the desire to shoot film. It’s only very recently that I’ve had the desire to get a 645 film camera (with optional digital back) – I’m rambling.
Great shots. Always happy to see a new skate photographer.
I was one of the original users on SBP, you probably knew me under a different username. I had stuff run in the mags with the original 1D, mostly postage stamp sized sequences. I remember the ongoing arguments about the pros/cons of using the 1D with its 1.3x crop on the fisheye.
For me shooting film is now mostly about 4x5. My medium format bodies have been used for projects I started back in the last decade. I'm waiting on the price of the new CFV II 50c from Hasselblad to see if I keep or ditch my existing V series bodies and lenses.
Also, people have been talking here about developing the negatives itself to minimise the cost. Ended up making a kind of compromise: bought Epson v850 flatbed scanner and taking the film-rolls for development company to get the negatives. The scanners pays for itself really quickly as here one 120 film roll scanning costs 16 euros :D
Alas, even now, that gear still sells for $500+ (even broken stuff) on Ebay, I can't bring myself to buy one. How is it still retaining its value? Just like Leicas. Who's taking photos and getting film developed that gives it strong market pricing? Nostalgic people unwilling to admit the camera is useless anymore? A puzzle.
Also shooting with medium format film, it allows me to get higher resolution than a similar priced digital camera. Digital Medium format cameras exist but are significantly more expensive compared to an old film one.
Certain film cameras in good condition are getting hard to find, so they either hold their price or go up. Sometimes if an influential film camera blogger mentions a particular camera that too can cause the prices to spike as well.
I've often heard a comparison to using film is similar to vinyl records.
They're certainly not 'useless' - this camera with good film should resolve a similar amount of detail as my Nikon D810 with a good lens. Obviously given the inflexibility you wouldn't use it for, say, photojournalism or most types of commercial photography, but medium format film is still used a lot in art photography and portraits.
Unless you're really consciously going on a photo-taking trip, you're generally not carrying around these huge old mechanical cameras, getting the film developed, etc. Every step of the process is more involved and time consuming -- where are you getting the negatives/slides printed afterwards?
Unless you're a high skills photographer, it just doesn't match people's use cases these days. Also, I've seen friends take up medium format as a fad, but they generally lose interest after a year at most.
That said, I borrowed an old Bronica several years ago, and I enjoyed it a lot. There something so satisfying about loading that film up, winding, exposing, and getting your hands wet on the chemicals, and having a big negative to look at, with sharpness outdoing anything you see even today in digital.
Beautiful camera. Joy to handle and work with.
With the technology of 1969 it was easier to build a rocket and land on the moon to take such pictures (and the video transmissions) than to fake the pictures.
In the first picture, notice how Walter Schirra wears two watches and how Paul Becker has like 7 pens in his pockets.
In the second picture, it says "MAIN MOM TALK" on the astronaut's chest. (see here to find out what it means: http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000717.html )
In the picture with the rover, interesting details of the wheel can be seen. It appears to be a weave of some kind, with crosses of bolted sheets of some kind along the middle.