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Our household is practically film camera free, as most of our film cameras have made their way to happier homes via eBay. But we always held back selling the Hasselblad system in the secret hope of using it again with a digital back. Well for two weeks in November, 2005 my dreams were answered when I was lent a Phase One P 25 Digital Camera Back, which is a portable 22 Mb digital back that fits on a wide-variety of medium and large format cameras. Since I started my photo studies with an old Rolliflex and then moved on to the Hasselblad, I was always more comfortable with the larger square format than the 35mm format.
For two weeks in between the holidays, classes, writing articles, and giving workshops I photographed as much as possible with the P25 – from studio work, to long exposure night shots, to a series my husband and I are working on that explores the NJ Meadowlands. Of course, I would have loved to travel to an exotic location – but the reality of concentrating on the world that exists between the glitter of ‘Sex and the City’ and grittiness of ‘The Sopranos’ was a challenge that I relished every day. I explored an area in NJ that has been industrialized, used as a garbage dump, crisscrossed with highways and thruways, and misunderstood for centuries. On a personal note, I am intrigued by the traces we leave on the landscape and how the water swallows the remains to hide and reveal them with the tides.
The P 25 back has a 4:3 aspect ratio with an effective CCD size of 4.89 cm by 3.67 mm (versus 6 by 6 cm for 120 film) with a pixel resolution of 5,488 by 4,145 that captures in 16 bits per color to create beautiful 127 Mb high-bit files. As soon as the digital back was attached to the camera and a short sync cable connected the lens flash sync to the camera back, I felt as if I was working with my old Hasselblad system again. The reassuring ke-clunk of the mirror flipping up and the soft shutter release quickly took me back to the many years that I photographed with endless rolls of Kodak Ektachrome 120. The camera is powered with rechargeable batteries that lasted all day and I used 1 and 2 Gb Compact Flash and Microdrives to capture the images in a compressed (lossless) RAW format. A 1 Gb card has enough room for 38 images, which when you’re working with a tripod and carefully considering composition lasts a lot longer than the rapid fire shooting of working with a dSLR.
Since I only had the camera for a short period of time, I tried to take a variety of images – high contrast, long exposure, close-up, and shallow and deep depth of field. I controlled all exposure manually with shutter and ƒ-stop as I reviewed the images with a histogram and exposure warning on a very bright 2.2 inch LCD screen. I was extremely impressed with the quality of the files in terms of color fidelity, shadow detail, complete lack of noise (even at 20 second plus exposures – see Rockefeller Center images), and sharpness. So impressed, that after working with the camera for a few days I started scouring eBay to find a used P 25 to continue my work with. Playing with the big boyz has rejuvenated my joy of photography and the P 25 realizes what a digital camera should be – straightforward, simple interface, delivering high-quality images in a variety of situations.
--Katrin Eismann
Hasselblad 503cx body with 50, 80, and 120 mm lenses, a prism viewfinder, and a variety of filters and extension tubes.
Please visit www.phaseone.com for additional information.
With special thanks to Wayne Sandmeyer, Area Sales Manager of Phase One in the NY metropolitan area for lending and explaining to me the Phase One P25 for this project. I appreciate your trust and generosity very much.
Additional Information on the NJ Meadowlands:
www.meadowlands.state.nj.us/
www.wildnj.com/br4-9.htm
www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0102/feature4/
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