Sequoia National Park: First Impressions Shooting the Hasselblad X2D

For personal reasons, we hadn't been able to take a proper holiday since moving to the USA. If you'd told me a decade or more ago that I'd be living in SoCal and still not have seen Yosemite — the number one item on my bucket list — for the first three years here, I would have told you to go away. But that's life for you.

Yosemite will have to wait a little longer. This time we finally made our first real road trip — to Sequoia National Park instead. And it was exactly that kind of trip: get out, walk a paved trail, hop back in the car. So landscape photography took a back seat — as it has, honestly, for the last four years.

The Camera: Hasselblad X2D

I decided to bring the X2D, which I picked up here on the forum, paired with the 45mm. This is an incredible camera — almost the perfect photographic experience.

The viewfinder alone makes everything look so good that you want to photograph anything and everything you point it at. It reminds me a lot of the 500 series waist-level finder in that way. Of course, when you get the images onto a computer, there's a slight comedown from that in-viewfinder high.

Plenty has already been written about what the 100MP raw files can deliver, so I won't repeat it. What stood out to me:

Ergonomics — the buttons are clearly designed with photography, not menus, as the priority.
IBIS — genuinely superb. On par with my OM System cameras, though I haven't tested it at longer focal lengths, and probably never will.

The Negatives

The obvious one is price. But you almost get what you pay for.

Out of this trip I made about 50 images and kept 5. Coming from film — medium and large format — I'm perfectly fine with that keeper ratio.

A few things I'm still working through:

I wish there were a 50MP capture option. I don't personally need 100MP files.
I still need to figure out the best raw processing workflow. For whatever reason, the in-camera raw files occasionally look slightly overexposed straight out of camera, while both Phocus and Lightroom seem to think everything's fine. I can understand Lightroom applying some auto-correction, but I expected Phocus, at least, to be an exact match for what I saw through the viewfinder.
I wish there were a way to simulate in-camera B&W. I loved that feature on the Fuji GFX-R, which I used to own.