Hasselblad 500C/M

The Hasselblad 500C/M is the camera most people picture when they picture medium format: a square 6x6 SLR, entirely mechanical, built in Sweden between 1970 and 1994. There is no battery anywhere in it. A body that has sat in a cupboard since the eighties will generally still fire, and if it doesn't, it can be fixed.

What makes it a system rather than a camera is that almost every part comes off. The film back detaches with the dark slide in, so you can switch from a half-shot roll of colour to black and white mid-session and come back to the first roll later. The waist-level finder lifts off for a prism. The focusing screen — the change that earned the C/M its name over the earlier 500C — comes out from the top without a trip to a technician.

A few things to know before your first roll:

• The shutter lives in the lens, not the body, so flash syncs at every speed up to 1/500. This is why the 500C/M refuses to die in studios.
• The mirror doesn't return until you wind on. After each exposure the finder goes black, which is alarming exactly once.
• The dark slide has to be out before it will fire, and the body and lens must be cocked together. Forcing a lens off while the two disagree is the classic way to jam one.

The standard lens is the Carl Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8, roughly a normal lens on this format. Loaded with Tri-X 400 it is about as close to a default medium-format setup as the medium has.

Images from the Hasselblad 500cm below: