I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends Hasselblad, and so in order to make the most out of it, I headed to one of my favourite places in the country, Glendalough. I haven’t shot with a medium format film camera before, and I didn’t want to waste too much film, so I brought my X-Pro2 with me aswell, and actually ended up shooting most of the images on that.

In addition to shooting stills, my wife decided to film my progress too, and so I put it together into this little video, which we’re quite proud of. It was shot by mounting a GoPro onto of a GH2 which was in turn put on a Gorilla pod, which was wrapped around the arm of my wife’s wheelchair. It was funny to look at but it worked really well. We actually shot about 2 hours of footage between the two cameras, and it took me a while to edit it all, but I’m happy with the result. Considering we didn’t plan any of this out, it turned out pretty well. The GoPro is a first generation and the picture quality isn’t great from it, so I did some 8mm and 16mm film emulation on the footage using film convert.

In terms of the images, I had a devil of a time getting the film scanned, and the results were awful. I left it into the lab and they were supposed to have it that day, but they had some delay. It ended up taking the best part of a week, and the scans they did are terrible. I won’t be going there again. I tried to clean them up a bit in Lightroom and Photoshop, but I would prefer to scan them properly myself. Unfortunately my film scanner only does 35mm, and I don’t have any other way to scan the medium format negatives at the moment. I will look at getting friend to do it when I can get the chance.

As for the X-Pro 2 images, I’m pretty happy with those. I shot mostly on a tripod, and I bracketed everything. I wasn’t 100% happy with a few of the shots, because the 18-55mm is a bit soft at infinity especially when you stop down. I actually don’t have a great selection of lenses for my Fuji so if I had been using one of the wide angle primes I think I would be happier. Anyway, the results are fine. They are mostly processed with Lightroom, but there’s a few images that were created using AuroraHDR too, and a few had some additional treatment with Luminar.

I’ve posted a selection below, but if you want to see the full gallery, I am trying a new way of posting sing the gallery options on my portfolio website, so you can see the results here. I was also shooting with my D700 and telephoto lens too, and those images are here. It was a productive session !

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