My current camera of choice is my Hasselblad X1D. It’s an older digital Hasselblad that’s a bit more affordable than its successors. I bought it for the medium format file sizes and all the pixels!
This is my baby. Beer is optional! One of the things this camera can do is shoot in different famous Hasselblad formats. The camera shoots natively in 4:3 resolution, but can shoot in traditional medium format like my Hasselblad 500C/M (6×6) and it can also shoot in the famous xpan format (65:24). I’ve owned this camera for over a year and never bothered to go goofing around with the xpan style. I don’t know why … I suppose I was still in love with the native 4:3 resolution. There’s plenty of shots in my gallery from this camera in that resolution.
I decided recently, with a day trip to the Cotswold planned, that I would do a bit of experimenting and have some fun with the 6×6 and xpan formats. These formats are available in the menus, so I decided to preset them as options on the command dial so that I can switch between them easily without having to goof around in menus. You can see the command dial top left of the camera. I does pop down flush with the body when you’re not using it, which is a nice feature. I set the C1 command to xpan, C2 command to 6×6 and decided to just switch back to aperture priority when I wanted to shoot in native 4:3. As a system, it worked really well. For the day I mostly stayed on xpan, but I did swap to 6×6 occasionally. I’ll include one 6×6 shot at the end of this gallery for fun!
The plan for the day in the Cotswold was some hiking through Malvern Hills. We’d picked a perfect day, with a really foggy, misty atmosphere at the top of the hill. It made for some very ethereal and mysterious vibes. I ended up walking 11 miles btw, with this heavy damn camera! But it was worth it.
I had only just parked the car and paid for parking when I turned and saw this lovely view. The house was framed by two gnarly trees and the fog made it the kind of place you’d expect a horror movie to be set. I also decided to create a new frame for my hasselblad photography, which includes a wider white frame and exif data.
The fog was wild and I kept stopping to look and think about shots.
Braaaaains! I definitely got Walking Dead or Dawn of the Dead vibes from some of these locations and shots. It was only one day of shooting and I don’t want to post too many shots, since it feels a bit repetitive. But the day was a cracking day for shooting and I had a lot of fun editing these. I can see the appeal of xpan photos with their wide, cinematic style. It’s a style I’m going to use more often I think. Of course, I think all photography styles get a bit boring when over used, so I have to be selective about when to shootin xpan format and when to shoot in other formats.
While I was out I did see a lovely, simple shot that I thought worked in 6×6.
The entire sky is just fog and I love the texture of the grass in foreground.
So that’s it! My first experience using xpan format on my camera. It’s definitely a format I will use more regularly and mix photos up with 4:3 and 6×6 as well.