We did this just outside the room where Mike Larson was giving one of his great seminars organized by Calumet and Sunbounce. We even borrowed his beautiful model for an hour or so.

So what about the H4D then? First of all, this wasn’t any kind of scientific test. I basically just snapped away some pictures like it was a compact camera and that’s probably not what it was intended for. (Although a friend of mine said he saw a tourist with an H4D in Venice.)

Let’s start with the bad news: ergonomics, build quality and handling sucks big time. And I mean really big time, my 450D feels a lot more professional. The H4D looks and feels like it’s made of the same plastic as my first DSLR, the 300D (aka the digital rebel). It’s very slow in writing pics to the card (not even 1 pic/second). I do understand that these are very large files but then the camera should have a larger buffer / more processing power. The autofocus is slow and simply doesn’t work at all if the subject is backlit. The menus seem to be designed in the 90’s. The LCD-screen is plain rubbish. If Canon would fit such a bad screen on an entry level DSLR, the forums would be filled with complaints. I could not tell anything about the pictures when watching them on the lcd.

Is there anything good to say about the H4D? Well, it has something that my 5D mkII nor my 1D-bodies have … a pop-up flash. Yes, that’s right, a pop-up flash.

But wait, there’s more: Once you download the huge files to your computer, you finally discover what Hasselblad has been famous for during decades: SUPER QUALITY. The resolution is just mind blowing. If I zoom a picture to 100% in Lightroom on my rather recent Macbook Pro, I can go and make myself a coffee while it’s rendering. To some this resolution is essential for their work but most of us can easily get by with a Canon or Nikon. To me, the biggest advantage of the Hasselblad files is the depth. The gradients are way smoother than any digital camera I’ve ever seen.

Since I met him for the first time, I’ve been wanting to take a portrait of Waldemar. You may not know him, but he’s the one that drives the van on the European Sunbounce workshop tours. He’s also the one that bends the ultra strong German steel in the Sun-Movers. He looks like a very tough guy (and I’m sure he is when needed) but he’s also a very generous man. And he’s the owner of a face that just screams to be taken a portrait of.

These were shot outside in the middle of the day. I underexposed the ambient so it didn’t play any role in the picture. We lit this with just one beautydish overhead.

I know the H4D is not supposed to be a replacement for a 5D mkII. It’s probably expected to be used tethered to a computer, in a controlled environment. But still, for that price I would have expected a decent construction, good lcd and excellent ergonomics. I wouldn’t even mind if they would have to drop the pop-up flash for that. If you need the resolution and/or the depth it’s probably still worth the hefty price tag and I’m not sure if the other digital medium format solutions are any better.

Conclusion: The H4D is certainly “haute cuisine” when it comes to image quality, too bad you have to consume it with a plastic fork on a cardboard plate. But still, I wouldn’t hesitate to rent one, if I need the image quality.

Come to think of it, it’s not that different from falling in love with a woman. You just don’t fall in love with a girl because she’s moderately interesting, slightly intelligent, not ugly and reasonable in everything. You fall in love because you get a kick out of Nobel prize winners or because she makes you laugh every minute (or just because she has the perfect boobs).

But in the end you might be probably better of with that first girl who can be trusted every time. I got a similar feeling with the 24-70. That lens has been my must-have/go-to lens when I need to play it safe. But to see if I can fall in love with it, I’m going to use it more often for a while during those times where I don’t have to play it safe and would normally choose another lens. Yesterday I took it with me on a long Geocaching walk with the kids and some friends.

Because the weather forecast was far from great, I used my bulletproof vintage 1Ds mkII. In combination with the 24-70 that’s a heavy beast to lug around for a long walk during which you need to operate a hand held GPS and a bunch of kids. But I don’t regret it as I’m pretty happy with the souvenirs I was able to make of this great day. I’ll keep committing myself to using the 24-70 more often for some time and I’ll report in later.

View on YouTube

For more info and purchasing, please visit www.motivationallight.com

We drove ourselves to exhaustion to get it finished but that’s easily forgotten when I look at the end result. The goal was to make a 90 minute instructional DVD, but we ended up with two and a half hours of video about learning how to light. We also tried to squeeze in as much small practical hints and tips as possible. On top of that, there’s an hour of video about how I post processed a number of pictures I shot for the DVD. And then we still have a long section about gear that we just couldn’t fit into the DVD. We’ll release those videos and some more unused footage soon as free online bonus material.

I’m very curious about your reviews, comments and reactions, so please let me know what you think in the comments.
We also would be very thankful if you would help us to spread the news about Motivational Light.

And even then, it took Pieter and me many months of hard work to plan, shoot and edit all this together. Right now we are editing like crazy to get the final details right. I’m extremely happy and proud about the way it all comes together in the editing booth. So I’m very excited that it will be available really soon now.

Here’s another sneak peek that will give you an idea of what we got out of our first days of recording.

View on YouTube

We are flooded with questions about the DVD, so let me give you some answers:

- The DVD is in English (or at least my interpretation of English).

- We are still editing but the final result will run somewhere between two and three hours. The biggest part is about lighting but there will be also some sections on gear and postprocessing. We also tried to squeeze in as much small practical tips as possible.

- We’ll offer the DVD as a download. That way you can access your purchase immediately and we avoid having to ask a higher price to cover costs like handling, disks, packaging, shipping, taxes, … We also shot everything in High Definiton and with the download you can enjoy the full quality. For those who want to have a physical disc, we’ll offer a slightly more expensive download + double DVD version. So as long as you have an internet account and a credit card, you can buy it anywhere in the world.

- We still need to finalize some last calculations but the final price for the download version of the DVD will be around 125 EUR / 175 USD

- We are honored that so many of you want to preorder but since you can have immediate access to the download, there’s no need to preorder.

If you have any more questions about the DVD, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments.

The first picture was shot from my hotel room balcony and all the others were shot during a 15-minute walk.

These gloves look and feel they were made by your grandmother and that’s not a bad thing at all. The lambs’ wool feels incredibly comfortable and the gloves fit my medium sized hands perfect. The idea behind these gloves is one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-it-myself ones. Just leave the fingers you need exposed: thumb and index finger. The material gives me enough grip to comfortably hold my camera and other equipment.

If you are embarking on a polar expeditions, these gloves are not for you. Your thumb and index finger will get cold. But I was pleasantly surprised how comfortable they are when photographing for a couple of hours in temperatures around freezing. The exposed fingers got cold but never went numb. So I’d say (exposed) thumbs up.

Have a nice weekend!

We started out with a Hensel Expert Pro 500 monobloc with a 150 cm octabox to camera left as the main light. A second Hensel monobloc with a softbox was placed on the opposite side. This second light performs two duties: adding light to the brick wall and taking care of some separation by spilling some light on Lut and the couch.

Here the main light is the Hensel monobloc with a beautydish. A Sunbounce micro-mini below and a pro to camera left, are used as fill light. A second Hensel monobloc with a softbox was placed on the opposite side to get a tiny bit of hair light.

For the last image, we replaced the softbox on the light behind Lut by a standard reflector and a grid. It was pointed to the floor behind Lut to create a streak of light.

I’ll talk about the how and why of the Hensel gear soon, but first I want to do some more testing. I also shot 3 rolls of film on the Hasselblad, if anything decent comes out of it, I’ll post that once I get the films developped.

I did quite some research about the options to scan the negatives of my Hasselblad 500cm. Once I’ve learned to work with it, I’ll write a more in-depth review about why I choose it and if it is able to meet my (high) expectations. For now, I’ll leave you with some first impressions.

I must admit that I was pretty sceptical when die hard film fans stated that a well scanned medium format negative could hold it’s own against a digital file from a modern DSLR. But now, I’m not so sure about that anymore. I don’t have enough knowledge and experience yet to make a founded statement on that. Too be honest, I don’t even want to spend my time on doing scientific tests to find out what is best. At the moment I think that you can’t really compare film to digital in a completely objective way. It’s like vinyl vs CD, sure a CD is cleaner but the technical quality of vinyl isn’t that bad and it has something that digital lacks: character. Like cd (or iTunes), I believe that digital is probably the best option for most photography but film still has it’s place if you’re after that certain look.

But back to the Epson V700, here are my first impressions:

- The thing is huuuuuge, it looks more like a desktop copier than a scanner. But it doesn’t look out of place next to a trendy Mac.
- It all feels pretty sturdy and professional.
- It comes with adapters for different sizes of film.
- I read some horror stories about these film holders but I found the MF holder to be pretty practical.
- The MF film holder holds 6 square negatives. That’s better for productivity than the 2 I had on my old scanner.
- Preview scanning is pretty fast
- Scanning time at 1200 dpi is rather fast too
- Scanning time at 2400 dpi takes a bit longer, but I’d rather have a slow but good scan than a fast but bad one. I haven’t tested higher resolutions yet.
- I’ve heard lots of good things about the Silverfast SE6 software that came with the scanner. The more advanced version of this software is supposed to be even better but for now I’ll stick to the SE-version. There’s already way more options in it than I can understand. It’s not “dummy”-software (although it probably has some dummy-mode”. That means that I’ll probably have to go through a steep learning curve but if that makes my scans better, that’s time well invested.
- Last observation for now: I’m blown away with the image quality (I bet you saw that one coming).

I only did a couple of test scans last night. The difference with my old scanner is huge. Not only in the resolution but also in the gradations captured. In the picture above, the little girl was a bit blown out. I tried to scan it for safety, so I got a pretty dull grey image that would give me more options for some dodging and burning. But before the dodging and burning, I cleaned up the dust and scratches.
The image below was shot on color film (Porta 400NC) and converted to black and white, I also did some cleaning up and some minor dodging and burning.

Scanned at 2400 dpi the above image of my wife became a 5115 x 5010 pixel image. That’s a pretty big file hey. Below you can see how much detail is present in a 100% crop. I must say that I found that to be pretty impressive.

Now I’m even more desperately looking for some free time to do some test shoots with the Hasselblad.

Here’s one more of the session with my lovely wife:

I also shot some pics with my 5D mkII and the 50mm lens during that shoot, mainly as a digital polaroid to check if the exposure I got from my handheld light meter were correct. Here are some of the digital pics:

I really want to do some posed testshoots soon. But because I just don’t seem to find the time, I played around with a roll of expired film to see how I’m doing with the Sunny 16 rule.

I also tried doing reportage style stuff indoors with a roll of 400 iso black and white film. Just to see how I would do when getting some meter readings every now and then, and then just guess for the rest.

I really enjoy the challenge the Hasselblad throws at me. It makes me think so much more about my images. For the first time in quite a while I feel like a kid in the candy store when I think of all the possibilities and things that I still can learn about photography like:

- discover what films I like best
- start developing my own film again and find out the results of different chemicals with different films
- learn to make decent scans (these scans are all done with my crappy old scanner, but a new one is on it’s way)
- try out flash with film photography
- …

For now on, I’ll try to learn this camera inside out but I’m pretty sure it will find it’s way in my work for some assignments (something I didn’t consider at all when I bought it).

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