Month: March 2026

The Ultimate Wide Angle for the V System When Hasselblad photographers talk about wide angle lenses for the V system, one name comes up again and again: the 40mm f/4 Distagon T* CF FLE. It is the widest rectilinear lens in the native V-system lineup, and for landscape, architecture, and environmental work, it remains one...

There are developers that photographers use, and then there are developers that photographers believe in. Rodinal, or Adonal as it’s sometimes branded, belongs in the second category. It is one of the oldest photographic chemicals still in active production — a concentrate so simple, so stable, and so opinionated in its results that it has...

A Deep Dive into the Mechanics — and Longevity — of the Hasselblad 500 Series, Pentax 6×7/67, and Mamiya RB67 Anyone who has spent serious time with medium format cameras has a story about mechanical failure. For many Pentax 6×7 users, that story involves the film advance lever — a deceptively simple-looking mechanism that conceals...

So the inevitable happened with my old camera. The film advance lever has started slipping. If you’ve never experienced this failure, here’s how it feels: you stroke the advance lever and about halfway through the throw, it slips. There’s a brief grinding sensation, the resistance drops, and the lever completes its arc without actually advancing...

Shot with the SMC Pentax 67 105mm f/2.4 on the Fujifilm GFX 100s — Wachusett Reservoir, Boylston, MA The Pentax 67 105mm f/2.4 has a reputation that precedes it. Mention it in any serious medium format photography circle and the conversation almost always gravitates toward its legendary rendering of faces — the buttery compression, the...

I’m always interested when a new color film hits the market. It doesn’t happen often anymore, and when it does, it’s usually a rebrand or a repackage of something we’ve seen before. So when I heard about OptiColour 200 from Optik Oldschool — a genuinely new color negative emulsion in 120 format — I had...