Vintage Hasselblad meets 2009 Nikon

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I’ve been doing a bit of shooting through an old WWI-era Hasselblad that I have. The camera was a gift from my Uncle Mike several years ago. It’s a beautiful old black box with shiny silver hardware, but the shutter has never worked and I’d be surprised if it’s fixable. Still, I’ve enjoyed having it out on a bookshelf over the years. On a whim during a recent photo shoot with the band Lovers Electric I decided to shoot through the viewfinder. This was something I’d experimented with before using a couple of other old cameras I have, but never with this one for some reason. I liked the results with the band shoot (scroll down and you can find that post from month or two ago), so I’ve since been playing around with it a bit more. While making Erinn sit for some test portraits for an upcoming band shoot I discovered that I could take out the plate of glass with the cross-hairs and get a much clearer picture. So I decided to take it out on the boardwalk to see what I could come up with.

I normally don’t go for gimmicks, but I’m enjoying it for now. And it’s nice to put the older camera back to work. It’s got such a great lens on it, it’s a shame to have it sitting idle on a bookshelf. I especially like using it out along the boardwalk. Venice has been photographed so much that it will be nice to come up with something a little different. I also threw in a shot of some lovely sunflowers we have sitting in our living room. Enjoy!

18 Replies to “Vintage Hasselblad meets 2009 Nikon”

  1. Right on, man. These look great. That Hasselblad really makes for a much different (better, IMHO) looking shot than those other cameras – like when we did the trumpet shoot back in Peoria. I really like the way the color of the sunflower is reflecting around inside off of the walls inside the camera on the last shot here. Are you just setting the old camera on a tri-pod and waiting for the shot (seems tricky for that action shot) or have you rigged up something wicked elaborate and inventive?

  2. Thanks Tom! Definitely not wicked and elaborate. I wish it was so I could have more consistent results. I basically took out the focusing glass that has the cross-hairs to get a clearer shot and then, after focusing the Hasselblad, I use an extension tube on the digital to get a close-up focus on the Blad’s screen. A macro would probably do the trick too. Problem is there’s a lot of vignetting in the Blad viewfinder and there’s a seriously shallow d.o.f. when using the extension tube, so things are constantly floating in and out of focus or getting that circular crop if I move too far in any direction. It kind of makes me seasick after awhile. If I was a better engineer I would create a mount to hold the digital up over the Hasselblad in order to keep things steady. But I doubt I’m going to do that.

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