Shooting Environmental Portraiture with the Hasselblad 907x/CFV 100c & Alpa 12 Plus

A Visit To See My Brother, Mike Hendrix

A lot has happened in the Hendrix family in recent months, and one of these things has been a condition my daughter Catherine has developed that requires fairly extreme ongoing medical intervention. I am exceedingly fortunate (and grateful) that I have a workplace that allows me to be productive anywhere I am (as long as I have a phone and/or a computer), as well as a company owner who values family highly and provides latitude for taking care of loved ones. So every 3 weeks for a while I am out of the office for 4 days at a time supporting my daughter through her treatment. She lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida, about 6 hours southeast of Atlanta.

My older brother Mike Hendrix lives south of Orlando, Florida, some 3 hours from Fernandina Beach. On this past trip, I decided to take a day and drive down to see him. Mike is older than me and retired. He suffers from Emphysema and various physical maladies from a long career, mostly driving big rigs, long hauling. He has 2 adult children, no wife, 2 cats. In his younger years, he drove amateur track racing, and also then played, and now to a lesser degree, continues to play in a metal band.

During the pandemic and the aftermath, there was a split in our family, a break, if you will. A situation I suspect many families found themselves grappling with. And it came down to long standing grievances and behavior, and the match that really ignited this long burning flame was the divisiveness that became more and more prevalent in American society during this period and continues to this day. I had not seen my brother Mike in nearly 4 years, not since the funeral service for my Dad, who passed away in 2021.

They say time and perspective heals all wounds, and I don’t know if that is completely true, but it has the potential to heal some wounds, as long as the wounded and wounders are willing to approach things with an open mind. If we cannot see eye to eye, then maybe we can at least still see heart to heart. It’s worth wanting to.

On this day, I asked Mike if we could sit out in his yard – he’s a smoker, and being inside his house gives me migraines. So we pulled some chairs around, and I said let’s sit in the back yard, but he said – You don’t want to go back there. So I peep through the fence and saw that it was totally overgrown. His old race car chassis(s) were back there and covered up with vines. I say, Oh, I definitely want to go back there, because right then I knew I had to have a photograph of him right in the middle of all that.

In The Act Of Shooting

I had with me the Hasselblad CFV 100c digital back and an Alpa 12 Plus tech camera with a Rodenstock 40 HR-W lens. I’d always wanted to take more portrait photographs with tech cameras and here was my chance. The light was low, we were in shade, so Mike had to sit really still, as I was using an aperture of f/16 and about a half second exposure time. No wind though, so lucky there. And I used the Electronic Shutter of the CFV 100c. It came out exactly the way I envisioned it. My focus was just a bit off, I would have liked to pull it just a bit more toward me to get more of the near subject sharper and sacrifice some of the sharp way back. But, still ok.

For a static subject, even a human being, obtaining focus with a manual focus lens on a technical camera is not difficult. As I said above, I would have liked to pull it a bit closer, but I think it was still ok. Who doesn’t obsess over their photographic results? With the low light and the small aperture, it was a half second exposure. Mike would have to hold still. But not just for one shot. This image is not cropped, this is 3 full size images stitched together. So this was Mike not moving for a half second exposure times 3 captures, where I have to shift the digital back into a different position within the image circle of the lens for each of the 3 shots. In this case, the Alpa 12 Plus we have incorporates a detent at the zero position and at the 15mm position (why, 15mm I do not know). Conveniently, 15mm happened to be about the extent of the scene coverage I wanted on each side. So it was easy to just shift until I felt that detent (You can request detent positions to be placed anywhere you like when you order an Alpa camera).

Now one of the wonderful and unique things about the Alpa cameras, in addition to their unparalleled design ethos and quality of materials, is that the gearing for shift is very precise – it is the most precise gearing of any tech camera. It can be toooo precise. More precision equals slower movement to travel the same distance. So Alpa had the wonderful idea to provide a release mechanism, which you can use to disengage the gear and just slide to shift. This came in very handy for this photograph, because having to turn a knob around and around for those extra seconds probably means Mike is going to move and I have a blurred human in the middle of all this. No such issue with the Alpa.

Usually I take a Phase One IQ4 150 on my trips, but this time I wanted to take the Hasselblad CFV 100c. This sensor shares the same BSI sensor technology found in the IQ4 150, which dramatically reduces color casts when shifting to the edges of the lens image circle. For these captures I used no LCC correction. The Hasselblad also shows off its fantastic color – the abundance of greenery is so well presented. The skin tones are spot on. This is a great combination – great color and tonality with an easy to use digital back from Hasselblad, on an Alpa, one of the world’s great shift cameras, and paired with the indispensable Rodenstock 40 HR-W Digaron lens.

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Well, that’s it, I think a great example of how cameras and photography play a crucial role in humanity. I didn’t know how Mike would react to me wanting to make a photograph of him, but he was into it, and we collaborated together on it, brother and brother. And I think it was also a great exercise for the act of using a technical shift camera for portraiture. I see so many landscape photographs taken with Alpa cameras. I would love to see more portraits made with Alpa cameras from our existing clients (and future clients!). A good challenge!

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steve@captureintegration.com – 404.543.8475