Hasselblad 500 Selfie (1990)
Now that’s some real “old-school” film photography!
A few years back (OK, it was 30+ years ago), I swapped some high-end audio gear with a friend for a Hasselblad 500 C/M “6×6” medium-format film camera he wasn’t using. More about that in my post: The Back Story of Cameras+Films, including how I ended up un-swapping it (under protest) a few years later.
The image above is a nice studio shot of a 500C/M camera which I found on the web (photographer unknown) and used to illustrate my post. The camera has chrome trim and a black 80mm lens, just like the one I used for a little while.
Anyway, I started out as the proud owner of this amazing camera, with no instruction manual, and no clue how to use it. Sure, I had a nice light meter, used for a few large-format (4×5 sheet-film) exposures in an advanced photography class at college, but my main shutter-squeeze for years had been a Minolta 35mm SLR with a built-in light meter. So, I was more than a little out of practice when it came to a fully-manual camera like this beautiful Hasselblad. As a result, it sat unused — in a box, on a shelf, in a camera bag — for a year or more.
