Hasselblad 1000F

HISTORY:

This is actually my fathers camera, but I have used it several times in the field. He purchased the Hasselblad from an estate sale from my Great Aunt with perhaps a little bit of prodding from me for just $75.00. Who says you need to spend a lot of money to get a good camera?

This Hasselblad 1000F was manufactured in the 1940's and after a good cleaning still takes wonderful and amazing photographs. It is actually a lot of fun to take photos with this camera, and twice attracted crowds while being used.

In this digital age, how people can claim to have taken photos literally counting off the seconds of the exposure? I did exactly that while on a trip to Zion, Utah on a hike in the back country. Standing on a sloped waterfall, in 2 -3 inches deep of the some of the coldest water I have ever known, I composed the image I wanted. I then spot metered the composition and prepared to shoot. I cranked down the aperture to f22 for depth of field, and held down the cable release. One one thousand.... two one thousand, three one thousand....... ten one thousand. The photographs are amazing. The first two prints hang on a wall in my parent's house, a Christmas present to my mother and a tribute the her aunt, a truly incredible woman.

It is the antithesis of my Canon, in that it is fully manual, and the operator even needs to manually stop down the aperture. This has caused my come grief when switching between a fully automated camera, to a the Hasselblad.

On my trip to Zion in 2003, I decided to use the hassellblad a lot more than I had in previous trips. It is slow, and clunky compared to my canon, but it is really nice staring down onto a large 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 in screen to focus and compose my images. Additionally, once I got into using it some, I actually really began to enjoy the retro fleeing I was getting using this camera. I noticed that I would take more time composing the shots. Since the camera didn't do anything for me I become more in tune with the process.

The problem with this camera was two fold. First, this is a big heavy piece of metal. Beautifully engineered metal, but heavy none the less. The problem with this was that when operating a camera such as this with bare hands in 40 degree weather, frost bite is on the mind in not actually on the hands. The second problem I discovered was that when cold, this camera really really did not like feeding the film. So my 12 exposure camera was now a 1 shot camera.