The HTS 1.5 tilt-shift adapter is compatible with five of Hasselblad's recent lenses. The trade-off to this flexibility is that it magnifies whatever lens you're using by 1.5x and reduces the aperture by 1.3 stops.

Let's face it: shooting with a medium-format digital camera can be a little like kissing your sister. Sure, the resolution offered by the latest camera/back systems from Phase One, Leaf, Sinar and Hasselblad is up in the stratosphere (for instance, last month I reviewed the P65+ system from Phase One which sports a stunning 60.5-megapixel sensor), but when it comes to innovative features, they don't stack up to what's happening with digital SLRs these days.

Don't believe me? Think about it for a second. Do medium-format digital cameras have features comparable to what is offered by even the most basic of DSLRs? Live View? Nope. Burst modes of three frames per second or higher? Nah. HD video capture? Forget it. In fact, up until recently it was hard to find a digital back that had a high-resolution LCD larger than 2 inches in size.

Granted, there are many people—including yours truly—who would argue that studio-oriented medium-format systems don't need all the bells and whistles hyped on digital SLRs. For instance, those canned "pre-set" modes or even, quite frankly, HD video, don't have much of a place on a commercial photography set. On the other hand, I could think of many different uses for Live View, such as composing photos from low angles while shooting untethered. A reasonably fast burst shooting mode on a medium-format camera would be great for photographing models in motion.

This is not to say there haven't been any exciting developments in medium-format technology in recent years. For instance, I'm intrigued by the Sensor + technology in Phase One's new backs which does a pretty good job of keeping noise down at high ISOs. (But at the expense of resolution, it should be noted. For more details on Sensor +, see last month's P65+ review.)

One of the most interesting "innovations" I've seen in medium-format photography recently is not camera-based at all; it's lens based. Furthermore, the roots of the innovation are traceable to the days of the daguerreotype, when view cameras with flexible bellows were the only game in town.

The latest iteration of the bellows comes in the form of a well-crafted adapter from Hasselblad which gives the company's latest standard lenses the ability to tilt, shift, and rotate. Called the Hasselblad HTS 1.5, this tilt/shift adapter is the sort of thing that may sound dry and specialized when you first hear about it but is actually very practical for both studio and field use.

I paired the HTS 1.5 with a 31-megapixel Hasselblad H3D-II 31 ($12,995 sale price through the end of June) and tested the combo in the studio of Dan Root, a fine-art photographer who shoots decorative arts, furniture, and jewelry for the Macklowe Gallery. For Root, the ability to use the tilt function in the studio to increase depth of field is a real time-saver since it allows him to shoot several pieces of jewelry at once and keep them all in focus. (He currently uses a Canon 1Ds Mark II with a Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 tilt-shift lens.)

We also shot with the HTS 1.5 out in the field, photographing buildings and street scenes using the adapter's shift function which is designed to solve the problem of converging lines, i.e. the appearance that a tall structure is leaning backwards when parallel lines in an image merge together.

Though getting a handle on how much tilt and shift to use in a photo is more of an art than a science and we struggled to a get a feel for it during some of our initial testing, the HTS 1.5 is one of the best-designed perspective control devices we've tried. The following are some of our impressions of this technology from Hasselblad.



QUALITY BUILD, HANDSOME DESIGN

Though it's called an "adapter," the HTS 1.5 is really a lens in itself and a very well made one. It locks onto the body of Hasselblad's H System cameras like a regular lens but remains purposely loose so you can rotate it 90 degrees to the left or the right to let you place the sharpness plane and shift direction almost anywhere you'd like.

The HTS 1.5 is compatible with five of Hasselblad's most recent lenses—the HDC 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 80mm, and 100mm—which attach to the front of the adapter. There is a trade-off to this flexibility though and one which Hasselblad, no doubt, considered when deciding to go with an adapter over a dedicated tilt-shift lens. The HTS 1.5 magnifies whatever lens you're using by 1.5x, effectively turning the 80mm f/2.8 lens we were testing into a 120mm. The adapter also reduces the aperture by 1.3 stops.

This wasn't such a problem during our studio shoots of jewelry where we used controlled lighting and shot close-ups, but did cause some liabilities out in the field. The 28mm f/4 we used to photograph buildings became a not-so-wide-angle 42mm with the 1.5x magnification. Plus, the loss in aperture affected the sharpness in our street scenes which we captured right at sundown.

Despite these trade-offs, we both loved the flexibility of the HTS 1.5. Swapping it between lenses was seamless and secure, letting us quickly move from shooting jewelry to shooting buildings. Also the advantages of being able to use five different lenses with one tilt-shift device cannot be overstated. It's like getting a whole stable of specialty glass in one.

As mentioned before, the construction of the adapter is impressive—not a surprise for Hasselblad—with a nice integration of metal and polycarbonate elements to give it a sturdy feel without being heavy. There are lots of good details in the design including the metal tilt bar on top which doubles as a handle for picking the camera up.

The knurled black knobs on the left side of the adapter—when looking through camera—which control the amount of tilt and shift are large and feel nice in your fingers. Turning them requires some effort which is actually a good thing because it allows you to get a precise setting without overshooting the mark. Meanwhile, red polycarbonate switches below the knobs lock in your tilt and shift settings when you find the levels you want.

Other nice "analog" touches on the HTS 1.5 include the rubber, mini-bellows between the tilt and shift bars, and the two scales which tell you the degrees of tilt and millimeters of shift you've selected. The adapter also ships with a handy metal module that raises the camera off the tripod by about an inch, giving you some added breathing room to more easily change settings.