I took a day trip to York, Pennsylvania yesterday to do a little test of the Hasselblad with the metering prism, diopter and focusing screen I bought for it, and two new black & white roll films I’d never worked with before; Fuji Neopan 100 and Agfa Retro 80. The Agfa is advertised has having almost H&W Control like qualities of grain and red spectrum response, but it develops so they say in HC-110. Since Kodak is not at all well these days, and they’ve stopped making Pan-X altogether, which is what I like using in my medium format cameras, I need another source of film.   So I am experimenting.

I haven’t developed the Agfa yet, but the Fuji is already stunning me. It’s emulsion backing is more transparent then the Kodak…to an H&W Control degree practically…so there will be more bandwidth in the resulting images.   Plus it lays absolutely flat on the scanner tray. I don’t need to fuss with it to get it to lay flat, it just does.   My shots with it in York are running though the scanner now.   I’ll see what kind of images I get later today.

But I am already delighted with what I see the metering prism doing for me.   All exposures are exactly on target with the new prism.   Much, Much better then I was able to get reliably get with the Gossen hand held.   My thing is I like shooting into the sun and that can be tricky.   I’ve developed the Fuji and the two additional rolls of Kodak Pan-X I took with me and glancing at the negatives as they came out of the wash everything was spot on.

And it’s faster to work with then I expected. Since there is no direct coupling between the meter and the lens, you have to transfer the reading you see in the meter to the lens manually. But the reading you get is in EVs (Exposure Values) and the Hasselblad lenses have EV settings on them that are a snap to use. Once you set the EV on the lens, the shutter speed and f-stop settings are latched together and you just rotate both depending on whether you want the highest speed or the greatest depth of field.

I am having zero problems now with focus.   The new focusing screen is both brighter and because it has that split-image focusing aid in the center, quicker to focus with.   Plus the diopter is a big, big help.   I can see everything snapping into focus now, whereas before I had to search it out and sometimes I was just guessing at it.   I got it wrong a bunch of times I later found out.

I should have done this Much earlier, but it was a pricy accessory.   The only problem I was having as I wandered around York was the Distagon wide angle lens is flarey.   I had to pass by a bunch of interesting shots simply because there was obvious lens flare where I was shooting from and I could not find a way out of it.   The Distagon is an old design.   It also has noticeable vignetting at the extreme corners.     But it’s amazingly sharp.   There is a newer 50mm lens for my Hasselblad I’ve seen on the used market, which they claim has improvements over the Distagon in terms of vignetting and flare.   But that’s another big wad of money.   There’s a 40mm that’s an even bigger wad of money and I really like shooting at the wide angle perspective.   It suits the kind of work I do.   But I can only spend so much on photography equipment in a year.   Film itself is getting a tad pricey…for some reason.

The Hasselblad is a tad heavy to start with, and the metering prism adds to that.   But it’s a compact weight and I don’t mind carrying it around if it’s because the camera is built to last.   I like solid things in my life and especially my tools.

[Edited a tad…]