in Jena may not have been the only people making glass, but they might just as well have been.

Arvid Hasselblad began by selling George Eastman’s cameras, and when Victor took over the business from his famous grampa, they were still using some Kodak lenses. In fact the first Hasselblads you might recognize as blads, used the old Kodak Ektar lens design for a few years. It was a good lens.

The Hasselblad was to cameras what magazine fed firearms were to firearms. You could park a Blad on a tripod, put a polaroid back on it, use a polaroid to check your lighting and color balance, and then switch to a fine grain black and white, take a few color slides, and move to a negative film. In the field you could change film as easily as changing lenses, and as often, or more often. At the time it was the only commonly commercially available camera that could do that; otherwise, you had to carry several cameras. And most of it was interchangeable; you could swap lenses, backs, finders, other accessories, and they all played nice together.

Except the Super WIde C, of course, It can use other backs, but little else. That’s because the Super Wide had a single dedicated lens, the magnificent Zeiss Biogon.

The Biogon, designed by Bertele while working for Zeiss. Correcting for astigmatism and retaining a flat focal length throughout the field is difficult with a few elements in the lens, Bertele did it with NINE pieces of glass, all in perfect balance, optically. The focal length of the one used for the Super Wide C is 38mm, which is close to a 21mm on a 35mm camera. Most manufacturers of lenses just give up, let the lens pincusion like crazy, and call it a ‘Fisheye”. The Super Wide C has a spirit level built into the viewfinder; so long as you hold the camera level when you touch off the shutter, the field of view is perfectly flat, and perfectly observes three point perspective. This is an interesting article that describes this camera very well, I think. “it takes magical pictures”.