The Final Boss Test
My new Hasselblad 21mm f4 XCD lens arrived via DPD on Sunday morning, so I got straight to testing the beast after cleaning my teenage son’s office chair of all possibly bodily fluids. A nice start to the day.
My first resort is always the living room in my house. I’ve taken many shots while testing various cameras and lenses, as it has some muted colours, a bay window, and is compact. The camera was my Hasselblad X1Dii-50c, and I had a single Godox AD200 flash pointing at the ceiling. I shot two exposures at ISO 200 and f8 - an ambient shot at 0.5sec shutter speed, and a flash exposure at 1/100sec. These were imported into the Hasselblad Phocus software, given a standard tweak - reducing highlights and lifting shadows really. The files were exported as TIF files into my usual Lightroom and Photoshop workflow, layered up, and blended so that the natural light did the heavy lifting. The result is below:
It’s darker than my signature look, but the colours are absolutely spot-on, the tones are rendered subtly, the details are tack-sharp, and the field of view is a sweet spot between that ultra-wide estate agent crap, and the tightness of an architectural shot. I could have removed a bit of blue from the white plaster, but apart from that it’s as perfect as I could imagine. My eventual aim is to try and produce results with only a single flash exposure that incorporates the ambient light naturally.
The camera did have a bit of a fidgee when I tried to connect to it via wifi, and crashed after a few frames when trying to write to the ultra fast, ultra expensive SD memory cards, so I’ll need to be aware of that when using this setup in the field. I need a big house to shoot at my leisure now, as I don’t want to test this when I’m on a limited timeframe. The thought of rebooting the camera and having to reconnect it every minute fills me with dread. It’s still possible that I have a dud of a camera body, but I’m stuck with it now, so I’m going to have to press on and just make things work. I’ll post some updates when I get further into using the beast.
