Hasselblad H6D Review - Nadia von Scotti - Sunshine Company - Cape Town

SunshineCo recently asked German fashion and portraiture photographer Nadia von Scotti from One League to do a creative review for us on the new Hasselblad H6D-50c. This was her response:

Team credits:
Styling : Jeandre Venter @ One League Agency
H&M : Sian Bianca Moss @ One League Agency
Assistants: Hylton Boucher and J’dee Allin @ CCA
www.nadiavonscotti.com

On basis of the great partnership with SunshineCo in Cape Town, I recently got the chance to review the new Hasselblad H6D-50c.

I wanted to shoot a clean black and white portrait session, clearly a kind of project for which this camera is made for. I used a combination of the Macro 120mm f/4, 100mm f/2.2 and the 80mm f/2.8 lenses.

Design-wise she’s definitely a piece of art, intuition and simplicity is the word to go for! No excessive gadgets, functions or buttons that would cause any form of distraction, it really bundles the focus on what you should (literally) focus on – to shoot a great picture.

One might assume this attribute to be in contrast to the price range that this camera system is located in. This would definitely be a false conclusion, because the camera masters the ability to reduce the nowadays complexity of options and thereby takes the general workflow to a whole new level. Usually I’m not a fan of remakes of old icons, but in this case they didn’t bring any new elements that are not necessary – it still remains a beautiful camera.

I like the new touchscreen. It really just adds to the benefits of the camera system without shifting the focus on it too much – well, it’s not an Apple product. To be fair, the display of colours could be slightly improved.

I usually shoot very fast and never use a tripod. I like free movements, spontaneous natural actions, walking or even running shots, fooling around – whatever feels natural becomes natural. So I really had to get comfortable with the significantly slower workflow that is connected to this medium format camera, but even while shooting hand held, I got a very high amount of pictures in focus. I also took some shots outside of the studio to compare – with no tripod, low aperture and quite dark lighting conditions. I got remarkable results compared to other camera systems that are also originally made to be used in a studio focused environment. The auto-focus is remarkably accurate, but I also like the addition of the “true-focus“ function which speeds up the workflow as it also allows more free movements again while maintaining the characteristic benefits of the camera.

The processing and range of colours are strikingly beautiful. Let’s say you take a shot of a blue jeans shirt. The Hasselblad shows you hundreds of different nuances of this blue – from deep sea to sky blue and more, warm and rich color, same goes for the tones in black and white, never saw so rich grey tones. I still got a great overall image quality with ISO 400, whereas with the old Hasselblad I could only go to 200 max… so I was able to shoot on location with a late afternoon light situation.

The body is nice to touch, it’s got a good grip. The whole overall impression of the camera can be described as significantly well balanced in terms of design as well as inside values and specs.

I shot my images mainly on f/2.8. The fall-off is beautiful, you would usually see this result only to get just out of film cameras. There’s a massive difference to the lower price range models of digital cameras like Canon or Nikon which also obviously produce very sharp images but when you compare them to the Hasselblad one’s they look super flat – not as “round“, warm, rich and honest.

To help with a real life comparison I would say this Hasselblad is the beautiful, mind-blowing girl next door. You adore her and want her as a girlfriend forever, she is just naturally beautiful, no fake boobs or platinum blonde hair – this would be more the Phase One in my eyes – she’s still hot but just not the same…