Hasselblad 501c/cfv 100c

uh well uh ector Christmas isn't ready yet um but at least it's Thursday which means of course it's time for me to commit some seriously heinous crimes against film photography Kodak has discontinued outputting bulk RS of Cinema film to photographers because I don't know life isn't fair and we all die alone perfect timing too cuz I just got a bulk roller frustration aside it's maybe time to consider other options digital options I never really thought I'd get to this point but well they've crossed the line you cross the line Versa you squeezed them you hammered him to the point of desperation but it's kind of a struggle for me because film photography is fun and cool and definitely won't kill you over time like smoking recently Braxton Wallace made a poignant statement in a video that effectively said he's at his best when he's shooting film and I immediately punched a hole in the drywall in agreement I too feel like I'm a better photographer when I shoot film so I started thinking maybe I could trick my brain into thinking I'm shooting film if I shoot a system originally designed for analog I have dabbled in digital a little bit to cover you know a few gaps in my process namely things like the extinction of Kodak AOC Chrome you squeezed him you hammered him to the point of desperation but admittedly I have found it kind of hard to find the same sense of you know purpose and uh intention when I shoot with limitations when I shoot with film well perhaps a solution that combines The Best of Both Worlds is a is a good place to start this Hasselblad 501c is one of my favorite cameras I've ever shot with it's honestly probably one of the best cameras Hassel blads ever made in my own opinion it's a total beast and its modular capabilities seem you know damn near boundless I've definitely shot some of my favorite work on this thing throughout the years so when Hasselblad reached out about trying this shiny new futuristic piece of Chrome here I was of course at first super digy hesitant but you know call me Curious George not because I like to go ape and you know throw my but because my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to try it out it's kind of like a hole in the wall of a bus station bathroom how can you really say for sure that you know what's on the other side until you you know stick something in I was curious because this digital back seamlessly clicks onto this you know late '90s mechanical dream machine aside from the mismatch of you know silver trim and black trim which definitely hurts my design aesthetic Soul says the guy whose office looks like the uni bomber's cabin anyway I can mount mount and on my old Hasselblad 501c and use this old awesome shutter Slappy film camera with a high quality digital back to I guess hopefully inch a little closer to shooting digital like it's film could this be the key to finally finding purpose and happiness in my life I'm not too sure so I grabbed a few other things that I'm not too sure about and hit the road to arrive at an answer by the end of this video that may or may not have saying the words graany days the guy that betrayed film [Music] [Music] photography all right what's up photography location I don't know lighting sh no dark slide I need to pull out all right 145 I think I got that right [Music] cool I can see the photo no Jason too bad the photo was pure unfiltered premium ass okay it wasn't ass it just wasn't really what I was looking for truth be told unless you just really up catastrophically you probably can't really take a bad photo on this sensor it's just that good I mean yeah this digital back is like what $7,000 that's like two rolls of ector Chrome I tried to mold my digital workflow to look like uh warmed up ector Chrome by doing things that you know digital photographers lament on all the time like changing sliders to get sick tones grades presets I don't know all this is new to me all I know is that I know what I want my ector Chrome to look like and if I can get my digital photography kind of in the same ballpark then I'll die a happy photographer when you know the volcano gets me and the beautiful thing is if I want to shoot some you know Chrome I can just pop this thing off and load a film back on the very same machine even if the shutter slap on this thing scared the literal crap out of these birds you know right over my car all right I'm going to do what I can to not get run over for this shot but I think I can get it no I think I got to get closer for these shots I was using a heavy brown filter and a polarizer to mimic my ector Chrome workflow the polarizer is the key to delivering those you know dark apocalyptic Sky tones so that shot was okay but I ended up liking this alternate a lot better it was actually here at you know yet another instance of someone dragging the toilet out of an abandoned building and displaying it proudly that I discovered I was already shooting this get up like film perfect toilet shot putting in unimaginable amount of pressure on myself to you know lock in and get the best out of a photo on the first try which I think led me to get some shots that I don't totally hate to be honest okay 130th F4 should probably take the polarizer off but whatever I only realized all this because this shot was supremely out of focus 102 Mega out of focus you know what I mean I did take a second one that turned out um a whole hell of a lot better though so weird having to turn on the back to take shots I've taken like a few that forgot to turn the back on for this shot it kicks ass I love it the colors are I think would sell [Music] it with a digital back on this camera you kind of work from the back to the front it's kind of like uh if you ever wiped before I think I typically start by turning the back on it's pretty much self- operational you know once it's on it's it's doing the thing it's ready to go I'm not really sure how it knows exactly when I've taken a photo but I don't know it magically does and I'm here for it [Music] trying to escape the hurricane like conditions me Monica and our rat Pig backed or headed into town for a little chemical picked me up you know to stop the shaking I will say that just like the waist level viewfinder that I don't currently have on here the back of this camera definitely kind of tricks you into thinking you took a better photo than you actually did though ultimately this shot wasn't really what I was looking for and I discarded it in place of this better photo [Music] when you're shooting a digital sensor back like this cfv 100c the frame lines take a little getting used to for sure it isn't really like a one to1 match in the uh in the viewfinder because the digital sensor although it is medium format it isn't nearly as big as the native uh film format of like Square format like 6x6 so the 100c actually came with a mask in the kit that I slid in over my 645 frame lines to add even more confusion basically it's this inner horizontally I guess longer frame line that will give you an idea of what you're shooting [Music] [Music] 12,000 lb oh no Jason do you see it that is so cute Baxter you're the land version of those anyway out there on the absolutely stunning Coastline with Baxter not that he ever appreciates the beauty because the only thing he thinks is beautiful is a cheeseburger the sun was starting to dim and turn that full orange tint I was admittedly a little bit afraid of how the 60 mm Zeiss lens would perform on a you know crisp digital sensor it comes from a different era an era where we didn't have hypersharp sensors that capture detail more effectively than our own [Music] eyeballs but I'm glad to say it performed pretty admirably maybe not comparatively to like a modern native lens for the system that this sensor hails from but it added a I guess vintage flare to the images emphasis on [Music] flare Holy balls I love this shot it warms my Edward Hopper heart to the core strong lighting a decent colors good subject you already know the deal that's really why you consider getting into a system like this the color interpretation that Hasselblad installs like I said before I've been trying to be more intentional as shooting digital I think that's the key to shooting it like it's film something that I've been looking into a lot is how you know different brand BRS produce different color profiles depending on whatever sensor is in their camera for example confining all my digital black and white work to a camera with a sensor that does not have a color filter array over it forces me to shoot black and white it forces me to be intentional the same way it would if I loaded a roll of black and white film into a film camera on the other hand color is a lot more complicated and I think Hasselblad is kind of leading this charge into that hypothetical Battlefield I've been trying to think of it like it's a film stock you put in portra 400 and you expect portra 400 colors you shoot Hasselblad and then you I guess expect Hasselblad colors and then you shoot to those strengths it's the exact same approach that I use when I shoot ector Chrome which leads me to say that all the images in this video are pretty basic in the edits it's just some contrast here and there things like white balance and some Shadow lifting that's about it just working with what the sensor spits out for me the same way I work with whatever ector Chrome resolves for me [Music] oh it's going to be go go go go go go thanks I got [Music] [Music] you I'm looking a little rough around the edges right now I shot a toilet earlier today probably don't need to shoot a second toilet but hear me out it's digital so you can shoot it as many times as you want it's good but I think I like my toilet's looking a little more Rough Around the Edges like me right now dude I need to shave I got bags under my eyes wrinkles on my forehead I look like death backer's had a big day yes he has is that aome hold on a second those sons of well what do you know they must have known I'd be showing up at some point because the artwork in the room was a chrome do I dare chug another flaming hot Mountain Dew and finish what I started I don't know the Legionnaire's Disease just isn't worth it anymore feels kind of weird to be charging the back of my Hasselblad but it is what it is I guess [Music] with some morning photography out of the way we hopped in the car and headed out into the middle of nowhere back to real life back to the horrors of reality yeah do it do what make the cow noise what are you talking about this is your footage I'm just going to waste it until you [Music] move excellent it feels very good to [Music] move there is this abandoned thing on a hill maybe an old Del Taco or something I don't know but it made for a good subject even when there wasn't really a lot of color color in the [Music] [Music] scene we eventually made it up to the bay to see my family but I had far more important things on my mind namely shooting some Vistas that maybe would finally win over the landscape photography crowd and a bidd to increase my field cred needless to say Baxter was still unimpressed and probably so will you be so the next day we hit the field with Big Dreams that were somewhat hindered by the available light but you know what they say if you can't work in light then you should probably just complain about it but you can make anything look good if you try hard enough right that's why they're still trying to make Zack Snider a thing I actually like this shot it's nice and muddy you know unattractive a look that I apply to my work and my appearance moving on down the road literally we saw some elk on the horizon so I quickly crashed the car and went to go shoot them in excitement I have taken a photo similar to this before literally on my first role of film many many years ago and I regard it as one of my best ever which says a lot about how much I've improved since then whatever regardless I wanted to capture something similar on the hassie and after some waiting and moving around I got close with this shot that I quite [Music] like anyway after stumbling upon even more of my dogs brothers and sisters I kept shooting away hoping for the best you know in absolutely totally amazing [Music] life it's really cool actually these elephant seals are massive and they travel like thousands of miles up from Antarctica here to Northern California for a warm winter you know patar and uh yeah to fight each other I guess just as massive as these thlb beasts are the aformentioned you know 16bit 100 megapixel files that this system chugs out for you one two back is [Music] on I did a test to many many harvests ago comparing large format 8x10 resolution to the um 100 megapixel sensor of the hassad x2d which is a similar sensor to what we're working with here and surprisingly they're pretty dang close sure there are key differences in things like depth and rendering and I guess execution but if an 8x10 sheet of film and this cfv 100c were in a bar fight one night I don't know which one I'd put money down on I'd probably just stay out of it and quietly sit my Virgin Apple Tei I guess what I'm getting at is to have the comparative you know resolution and detail from something like an 8x10 sheet of slide film on a sensor that is far more portable than 8x10 is a tremendous [Music] thing at the last location for the day a location I shot when I first started out in well photography for sure but more specifically film photography some of my all-time favorite images were taken here on one of my first roles of film that ended up really being you know the hook that dragged me down into the hellish furnace of film photography to be back here shooting with this setup felt like a complete circle it felt unreal to be honest and frankly a little undeserved pause on that thought because holy sh this shot slaps harder than a restraining order anyway yeah I miss those days when in you know ae1 was like 70 schack for body and lens when portra was like $9 I mean eor Chrome hadn't even been brought back from the dead yet well there's really only one shot here but those days are kind of long gone and shooting digital doesn't seem so egregious to me anymore you know depending on the use case I suppose I definitely haven't given up on film how could I I'm ass deep in film cameras I'm if film stops being manufactured whenever I have the money to shoot film I will of course but I got to say using this digital back in combination with film on the hassy does ultimately give me that super important feeling of intention which at the end of the day is really all I need to take the photos that I'm personally content with [Music]