Hasselblad 555ELS

By the time the 555ELS arrived in 2003, film was already on its way out and Hasselblad was selling this body to a shrinking room of studio shooters who refused to put down the V system. It is one of the late motorized Hasselblads, a battery-driven 6x6 with the motor wind built in. No crank, no thumb advance. You press the button and the motor cocks the shutter and pulls the next frame, then you press it again. Everything about how the camera handles flows from that drive.

Pick one up and the weight tells you what it is for. You do not sling this on a strap for street work. It lives on a tripod or a column stand, fed by a back full of 120, while you stand at the front of it with a loupe. The waist-level finder gives you that big square ground glass, bright in the middle, reversed left to right. There is no built-in meter. The body makes no attempt to read light, so you bring your own.

Focusing depends on the lens and whatever finder you bolt on top. With the standard ground glass you focus by eye, and the central area snaps in and out of sharpness cleanly with a good Zeiss optic mounted. The leaf shutter sits in the lens, not the body, which is the technical heart of the whole V system. Speeds run from a full second up to about 1/500, and because the blades live in the lens, flash syncs at every one of them. That all-speed sync is what studio people pay for. You can knock the ambient down by stopping the lens, then overpower the sun with strobe at a high shutter speed, something a focal-plane camera simply cannot do.

Since the body gives you nothing for exposure, an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app sets your base, and the leaf shutter's all-speed sync means a daylight-fill flash reading drops right in without a sync-speed ceiling fighting you. Meter the scene, set the aperture and speed on the lens, and the flash follows.

The weakness is the battery and the electronics. This is a fully motorized body, so a dead cell is a dead camera, with no mechanical fallback to limp home on. When the drive or the wiring acts up, a repair on a low-production late body runs expensive, and not every tech will touch it. You are trusting twenty-year-old electronics to keep firing.

Today the 555ELS sits in an odd spot. People who want a motorized Hasselblad usually grab the cheaper, more common 500-series EL bodies and pocket the difference, so this one trades on being a late, low-production body rather than clearly the better camera. If you already own the lenses and the backs and you shoot tethered to strobes in a studio, it earns its keep. If you want one body to carry, a 503CW with a crank makes far more sense.