August 2022 | A Hasselblad in the Huayhuash: shooting medium format film in the Peruvian Andes
In August 2022 I was fortunate enough to be a part of an ambitious group hiking trek in remote Peru facilitated by YouTuber Kraig Adams. We spent 11 days traversing the Cordillera Huayhuash in an 80 mile circuit in the Peruvian Andes between 14,000 and 18,000 feet (4,250-5,150 meters).
It was an extraordinary adventure for me and I brought my Hasselblad 501CM, one lens, and a load of film. I feel that the images I created were spectacular and some of the best I've made; I made a video about the process, which I encourage you to watch if you’re interested (includes darkroom printing section!), but I wanted to write an article breaking down my photography details more specifically.
I took with me my trusted Hasselblad 501CM, which I upgraded to from the 500CM because of the improved mirror geometry, and my 180mm f/4 lens which, being on the telephoto end, benefits from the mirror geometry. I took with me mostly black and white but two rolls of color film which I shot in my A16 film back (A12 for all of the black and white).
My black and white films of choice were Kodak Tri-X 400 and Fujifilm Acros 100ii, while my color film choice was Fujifilm Pro 160NS. I’m quite disappointed in the discontinuation of Pro 160NS, it is by far my favorite color film. The Acros I love for the tonality and smoothness; I'm always astonished by the detail it retains. Tri-X I love for the reasons many people do - it has a classic grainy look with a (in my opinion) fantastic contrast. The only other 400 speed film that rivals Tri-X for me is Bergger Pancro 400. I feel like the grainy texture of 400 speed film is frequently discounted in landscape work in favor of slower films with higher resolution and less grain but I think the texture renders landscapes beautifully.
If I wanted a perfect representation of reality I would anyway choose digital, for which I think the medium is unmatched, but when I think about the way I remember things it more closely matches my film photographs. When I remember things, I do so rather clearly but in a manner that I don’t believe is necessarily reminiscent of reality itself per se. Rather it is the idea of something, something specific for certain, but the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. It’s grainy and the shapes of things and their texture is the first thing that comes to mind, not the colors or the fine details. Those may wash in with concentration when I close my eyes but the primary association I have with the memory is most reminiscent of my black and white photographs.
I love square format, and I love my Hasselblad. I think the balance of square format just makes sense to the way I think about composition and how I tend to examine images which may be the sum of my experiences or somewhat attributed to the way my brain works but that’s how I feel: squares make sense. I have three lenses, the 100mm f/3.5 Planar, the 120mm f/4 Makro-Planar, and the 180mm f/4 Sonnar. I’m on the fence about the 50mm f/4 Distagon. I have the C T* version of the 100mm which I find to be a spectacular lens and superior to the more common 80mm. I have the Zeiss ZV Classic versions of the 120mm and 180mm which are optically identical to the V Series contemporary versions but released at the end of the film era in the mid 2000’s. I think their design is really sleek and classic and the glass in mine is perfect. The 120mm I use for macro work with flowers and frequently with extension tubes. The 180mm uses my favorite optical formula, the Sonnar, which I find gives a spectacular contrast and rendering of out of focus areas.
The 180mm was the only lens I took to Peru. It is equivalent to roughly a 100mm lens in 35mm or full frame terms which is moderately telephoto for landscape work and not to mention a heavy beast of a lens to trek long distances at high elevations with. But I think it lends a unique perspective to landscapes that feels immensely more personal to me. I felt like it rendered the textures of the rocky Andes Mountains so spectacularly as well:
I used a tripod for every shot, and a short cable release to maximize detail and I metered most shots with my phone. I brought with me my Minolta Spotmeter F, however it quit on me 3 roles in (not battery, something with the circuitry I think) and so I ended up using a lightmeter app on my phone for most of the trip. This was not really a big issue though, especially working with negative film and understanding that an averaging meter is going to seek to make everything gray I could click around the scene in the app and interpolate any modification based on what I wanted in the image. (for example if the meter app is telling me 1/60th of a second when I have it pointed at a highlight and I want the highlights to be bright in the image I would set the shutter to 1/30th or even 1/15th to allow the highlights to be exposed properly. Setting it to what the meter dictates would make the highlight middle gray, relative to the rest of the image. It isn’t perfect and I would prefer my spot meter but there are two truths that have proven true at least for me, so far. The first is that negative film has extraordinary latitude, the second is that any meter can work well in most situations as long as you understand what and how the meter is reading and why.
There were one or two occasions that I wished I had brought the 100mm f3.5 lens to achieve a slightly more broad perspective. On those occasions I think I felt too close to the mountains and that I could not include the full vertical environment from glacial lake to peak. But especially in hindsight I do not regret taking only the 180mm because I think that there is actually something about the increased compression in the longer focal length which ironically portrays the vastness more intimately than a wider focal length would have. This I think is especially true in some of the images I made on the one very cloudy day.
I also think that there is immense value in leaning into limitations. The medium itself of film is limited, especially in the context of digital photography, in that each roll of film I put through my Hasselblad can record 12 square images. The process for setting up and measuring the light and setting the camera accordingly takes time and adding the limitation of having only one prime lens means that I have to force myself to observe within the confines of those limitations. At first this feels limiting but at least to me there is a tipping point at which those limitations feel less like shackles and more like wings that let me see creative solutions in the way of images.
Adding to that is the fact that the incremental cost of each image is notably high. One 5 pack of Kodak Tri-X 400 in medium format costs around $48 today, in September 2022. That means that each shot I take costs 80 cents in the film alone. Then there is development and printing and the time spent doing that: I develop all of my film by hand myself which does mitigate the cost some, but it adds up. Especially with black and white film there are a hundred different options but I'll stick to what I use which has worked for me: a 500ml bottle of Rodinal is roughly $15, and a 1000ml bottle of Ilford Rapid Fixer is roughly $16. Those two things get me very far because I use Rodinal at 1:50 dilution and my tank requires 500ml of solution. That means 10ml of Rodinal to 500ml water, and my tank can hold 2 rolls of 120 film. That boils down to 15 cents of Rodinal per roll of Tri-X. The 1000ml of fixer gets diluted 1:4, and I make 1L batches so 200ml fixer to 800ml water and that can be reused. I test my fixer before each use and typically I get about 18 rolls of film through 1L of working solution, or roughly 90 rolls per $16 bottle yielding an additional 18 cents per roll of film. That means from start to finish the monetary cost of raw materials for creating a single negative today is about $1.13.
That adds up quickly. And it makes me consider more closely the moments that I choose to focus light through a box, burning an image into film. I love the process because of and for these limitations as much as I love my iPhone for its utter lack thereof. I think there is balance in seeking mastery of both.
Black and white is where my heart is but I do appreciate the value in color and that is why I took two roles of Pro 160NS as well. I shot those through my A16 back which has slightly better conservation of film at the cost of some image height. The A16 back shoots a 6x4.5 image rather than a 6x6 square image. I have a limited amount of Pro 160NS now that it has been discontinued, so the greater conservation afforded by the 645 film back and the fact that the color work was meant to be complementary to the primary black and white images made, I think, for a nice pairing.
Printing my black and white images optically by hand in the darkroom is my favorite way to see and to present my work. I love the process and the physicality of it which I do feel like shows through in the final result. I also make only a limited series from each negative I choose to print. Scarcity is a component of value. It is not the sole component by any means, and increased availability does not in and of itself diminish value per se, but in so far as scarcity is a component of value I feel that choosing to make my images limited is valuable.
I believe that you cannot conserve that which you do not know. I think conservation requires intentionality and intentionality requires awareness, at a minimum. Following the vein of thinking that conservation of our natural world is something valuable and worth pursuing I hope that my images can inspire an awareness of, if not a connection to the environments they depict. The glaciers in the Cordillera Huayhuash are shrinking rapidly and we humans are causing them to do so. I found the landscapes I found there to be stunningly beautiful, and I hope that you may appreciate the images I made of them. This was my first time filming a video as well - I'll leave the link here again and I'd appreciate any thoughts or comments!
