News from Hasselblad

Let’s look at this month’s two big announcements and what they mean to you.

First off the Hasselblad Owners Club. You might be forgiven for thinking that this is just another Flikr type venture, but it’s a lot more: Some months ago I wrote to Hasselblad and suggested (half seriously) that they produce a limited edition poster featuring the iconic photos of Neil Armstrong on the moon with the caption “Relax, we shoot Hasselblad” for photographers to show their clients. Why? Let me back-track a bit. If you’ve ever shot film with a V system (square) Hasselblad you might have noticed the two V shaped notches that appeared in the frame edge. These were a sure sign that the film had gone through a Hasselblad, and became known as something of a quality mark. It has become increasingly difficult to stand out from the digital crowd these days, but for a while now clients have begun to realise that not all digital files are created equal. Of course not all clients noticed the notches and even fewer look at meta-data in digital files, but they will notice that your work is being displayed on the Hasselblad site. Think of the Hasselblad Owners club as the virtual equivalent of the old film notches. Hasselblad users, and only Hasselblad users will be able to present a portfolio of pictures to clients from within the Hasselblad site, a site that gets something like 1.2 million visitors a year, I’ll be putting images on the site as soon as I can, seems like a smart marketing move.

O.K now on to the H4D40.

The H4D40 an evolution of the H3D incorporating a bunch of user requested improvements, I thought I’d dedicate some space in the next few columns to explaining some of these features. One of the biggest ones for me is the “true focus” system. The centre AF point in a camera is, for technical reasons (due to light and stuff), always the most accurate point and of course in medium format cameras it’s the only AF point. Why not just throw in multi-point AF I hear you say, well I’ve asked and it just cannot be economically done, the AF sensors that Canon and Nikon use are just too small for a medium format system and to custom build one would cost insane amounts of money.

(If anyone reading has a few million to spare and would like to build a multi-point AF system please let me know). O.K so with only one AF point what do we do when the bit we want in focus is not dead centre of frame? When that happens (and that seems to be always) we focus-recompose. That is put the AF brackets on the bit we want sharp (say the eyes in a portrait) “grab” focus, recompose and shoot. All good right? Well no sorry that doesn’t quite work, the problem is when you tilt the camera up, the distance from the AF sensor to the eyes is shorter than the distance to the eyes when you tilt back down, it’s a trigonometry thing. This means the focus ends up behind where you want it.

Don’t believe me? Google “focus recompose” and you’ll get a bunch of links like “Why focus-Recompose can give non accurate focus”, “Do not focus-recompose”, or the slightly more direct: “why focus/recompose sucks”. This is where the H4D’s True focus comes in. Because it’s all a matter of trigonometry, if you know how much the camera was tilted after the focus bit,  you can calculate the distance to compensate using the simple formula below:

vt1 → t1 = L/(c − v); ct2 = L − vt2 → t2 = L/(c + v), t = (2L/c)/[1 − (v/c )2]

O.K  that’s not actually the formula, I made it up, but you get the general idea…. I’m probably making it all sound a bit complicated but I have been testing the feature and am very pleased to report that it works, all credit to those clever Swedes. See if you can get to one of the events around the world on the 10th of February where you’ll be able to test the camera for yourselves.

Lastly  I’d like to share a couple of links I’ve come across this month.

First an excellent post from an Art Buyer for photographers on how to get hired:

http://blog.melchersystem.com/2009/11/18/tips-to-be-hired-as-a-photographer/print/

A website tracking copyright infringements:

http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/

And some cool photo’s of Dubai taken with a camera from 1857:

http://iconology.therndm.com/archive/dubai-aged-martin-becka/800

And finally Newsweeks list of re-touching scandals:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/231629

Over the next few columns I’ll continue to look at features on the H4D as well as sharing some tips I’ve picked up over the years for all H cameras. I’d really like this column to feature content that photographers actually want to read so please send any feedback/questions comments to newsletter@nick-t.com and I’ll do my best to respond.

Nick-T

Tagged as: h4d, h4d40, hasselblad, hasselblad owners club