Mini monitor for tilt shift

[John Woods]

In common with other medium format cameras, the display on the back of the H3/H4 bodies is poor by comparison with, say, the Nikon D3, which I use (with unthethered live video) to check focus across the field when using a tilt-shift lens. If the H4 had corrected this problem I would have upgraded from my H3DII-50.  But alas the H4 is still poor compared with Nikon.  I use live video in tethered mode to aid focussing with the Hasselblad Tilt-Shift lens, but the live video display on the computer monitor is a joke.  It would be great if Hasselblad produced a small high resolution display that could be fitted onto the camera accessory shoe like a flashgun.  What I have in mind is something along the lines of the 5.6 inch high resolution display with 1280 x 800 (= 1 million pixels) display made by a company called SmallHD  (http://www.smallhd.com/). The display should be zoomable like the Nikon one, but unlike the tethered live video on H3DII50. I would be interested to know whether such a device would be feasible and commercially viable. It might be easier to implement than upgrading the display built into the H3D camera back, which is useless for tilt-shift operation, as is pretty well the live video on the H3DII-50.  John

[Henry]

John,

I share your interest too as using the HTS on the H3D-50 can be pretty tricky to say the least!  I don't have a laptop so haven't tried tethering in the field - my kit weighs enough as it is!  I wonder if using something more lightweight, like the iPad or similar tablet say, would be possible, but I know a new cable would need to be made for the iPad to go from Firewire to the iPad connector-port as it lacks a FW port.

Coming off topic a little, what's others experience of DoF and what do you use for setting hyperfocal distance?  Using the f-stop marks on the H lenses was fine for film, but no way near accurate enough for the Kodak 50MP sensor, and I'd be keen to learn from others experience.  Where do you put the infinity mark when shooting at f16 on the 28mm - the 16mark is wrong, so where do others find it works (and for other focal lengths) - looks more like f4 to me, or am I wildly pessimistic? Obviously tilt on the HTS helps a lot, but I don't always carry it, and as John notes, judging sharpness is tricky!

Henry

[John Woods]

Coming off topic a little, what's others experience of DoF and what do you use for setting hyperfocal distance?  Using the f-stop marks on the H lenses was fine for film, but no way near accurate enough for the Kodak 50MP sensor, and I'd be keen to learn from others experience.  Where do you put the infinity mark when shooting at f16 on the 28mm - the 16mark is wrong, so where do others find it works (and for other focal lengths) - looks more like f4 to me, or am I wildly pessimistic? Obviously tilt on the HTS helps a lot, but I don't always carry it, and as John notes, judging sharpness is tricky!

Thanks, Henry.

This morning I used live video on my H3DII-50 with the 35-90 zoom lens.  My aim was to take a dawn picture of the view from my second floor window, which looks through gardens to the Mediterranean Sea (I live on the Italian Riviera). The challenge was to achieve sharp focus of the distant subject and on the blossom on the orange tree outside my window.  I used f/11 and manually adjusted the lens (through Phocus using a tehered MacBook) first on the blossom, then on a distant building, then split the difference to obtain what was in effect an empirically-determined hyperfocal distance.  It worked after some trial and error-correction.  The resulting photo is nice and sharp from the blosson in the foreground to the distant sea.  But - and here is my point - the image on the laptop monitor created by live video is awful.  Streaky and poor contrast.  I used the focus indicator, which is qualitative, so one really does not know when it is indicating sharp focus.  One cannot tell by inspecting the LV image.  Plase, Hasselblad, do something about this.  JW