Bladdy Hell
Lately, I’ve sold a whole bunch of gear which has been surplus to requirement. My mirrorless gear which I was using for video capture was replaced by a tiny DJI Osmo Pocket 3 unit, my old drone has been updated to a DJI Mini 4 Pro, and my old Nikon DSLRs were gathering dust in my camera storage cupboard. Don’t mention the thousands of pounds worth of studio lighting which is totally obsolete though. I can’t even give that stuff away. Literally.
I’ve ringfenced the proceeds of the various sales, and my eventual aim is to purchase an ancient, medium format Hasselblad H system digital camera plus some lenses and a tilt/shift converter for personal work, and perhaps a bit of commercial work if things pan out as I hope. Most of the used camera retailers have regularly updated stocks of the equipment, as the dentists who own them tend to update to new £20K camera bodies to take pictures of their cat as soon as they become available. The first Hassy H-series I saw in the wild was at Centerparcs in Sherwood Forest, being used by a dentist to take snaps of his kids.
The H system has gone through an evolution from the original H1 (a film camera I owned for about a month as described in this post), to the improved H2, then various iterations of the H3D, H4D, H5D, and finally the H6D which has a 200 megapixel behemoth of a multishot sensor. This is the only one still being manufactured (now owned by DJI).
The models I’m looking at are the H3Dii-39, or one of the H4D bodies which has the largest sensor size. This allows the pixels to have a bit of room to do their work, and therefore gather more light to produce beautiful 16-bit colour raw files with a 15 stop dynamic range - nothing that any DSLR or mirrorless camera can do (except the brand new medium format Fuji GFX cameras). The Hasselblads are heavy, clunky, a pain in the arse to use, difficult to service, and demand a more considered, slow approach to image capture - just what I’m looking for in my old age.
It’ll be a few more weeks until I’m in a financial position to splash the cash, but watch this space.
