There’s a reason they called it a ‘Hassel’-blad. It’s 3.1 kgs. You need to pump iron for a month before you can take it on a full day shoot. My right bicep is distinctly larger than the left after 3 days of shooting with this machine of pixel destruction. The Pelican case it’s in doesn’t quite fit into the over-head compartment on your 1time flight and you beg the stewardess not to lock it in the unpressurized hold. It eats power, with 2 separate battery packs that need changing every 2 hours. Every time I press the shutter button I can hear the whizzing crunching beauty of a new 40mb compressed Tiff. It will be daunting 110mb uncompressed Tiff when I open it on my Macbook back at the Hotel. After each shot it will take 4 seconds to show me the image on the Phase One P45 back. But you don’t really look at the image on the back. You’re looking at the Histogram to see if you haven’t botched the levels. There will be time to look at pretty pictures later. Right now I’m lugging 400 thousand rands worth of camera and glass over Nelson Mandela bridge in Downtown Joburg, trying to not to underexpose the skyline while avoiding the mad jostling Taxis. They might have taken a Hasselblad to the moon, but they won’t often take a Hasselblad to a busy Braamfontein bridge on a Thursday evening.

The thirty thousand dollar camera sensor (also called a ‘back’) is made by a separate company to Hasselblad. The sensor is 10 times the resolution of my top of the range Canon. It only takes 160 pictures on the 8 gig card I have. It’s 39 Megapixels but the advertised Megapixel counts are confusing. It’s not so much that the camera is 12 megapixel or 8 megapixel or whatever. You shouldn’t count pixels, you should look at the size of the sensor. The size of the piece of machinery that captures and processes the light. The size of the canvas you’re imprinting light onto. Hasselblad are Medium Format cameras, which means the sensor is massive. But the clarity, beauty, and detail you will only really witness when the final images are printed. For this project, my images will be printed on walls in 120 Hotel rooms in 3m x 3m sizes. For the first time I really feel that I have an actual skill as a photographer because I got such great results out of this beautiful piece of machinery.

Great marketing: Hasselblad used by Astronauts on the Apollo Moon landing

Follow Hasselblad USA or Hasselblad UK on twitter.
You can also rent your own Hasselblad from Photohire in Cape Town.