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Hasselblad SWC (2)
What's the attraction?
I first became acquainted with the SWC in the late '70s when commissioned to photograph all of the practical and much of the studio and museum located items for three BBC TV Publications... "The Craft of the Potter" with Michael Casson, "The Craft of the Weaver" with Peter Collingwood and "Patchwork Quilting". Most craft studios and museums are notoriously small, cramped, have no facilities for photography or all three... and I needed to take many environmental portraits as well as working close-ups. The 20mm, 24mm and 28mm lenses on my 35mm cameras could have answered the first problem... but my Nikon F2 bodies had a sync speed of only 1/80th of a second and flash was needed almost exclusively. So being a "wide-angle" type of photographer I bought an SWC first, rented a 500C as and when I needed it... and bought a 500C system shortly after because I used it more than I imagined I would.
I got my priorities right because apart from photographing cramped interiors for money I also photographed architecture and landscapes for a stock picture library... as well as for pleasure. To me, visually exciting architecture was either classical or modern and it certainly didn't need to be photographed in a traditional way with "verticals" vertical. And to me landscapes were vistas... and the wider the vista the better the photographic opportunity. With the SWC's 38mm Biogon taking in a diagonal angle of 91 degrees (72 degrees horizontally and vertically) I was able to photograph both architectural and landscape subjects as my "wide-eyed" vision saw fit. Sometimes I succeeded in this quest... but many times I didn't because the SWC, even with it's all-embracing and dramatic angle-of-view was not an easy camera to master.
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