Putting filters onto your Hasselblad lenses

Those of you who like to shoot landscapes using a Hasselblad with agree with me that it is a pain to do so. Very often it’s because Hasselblad V series lenses has a bayonet thread unlike most other camera lenses. This means that your regular (and expensive) B+W filters used with Canon and Nikon DSLRs cannot be used with Hasselblad unless there’s some sort of adaptors.

If you are like me, who uses square filters for landscapes then you need more than one adaptor to make it work.

This is what today’s blog entry is about.

The first adaptor that you need is one that converts your bayonet mount into a threaded one.

For my case, I got a Fotodiox B70 (the size of my lens) to 77mm adaptor for my 50mm f/4 CFi. For my 150mm f/4 CFi, which is a B60 thread size, I bought a B60-62mm adaptor instead.

With these two adaptors, I can fit 77mm filters and CPLs to my 50mm and 62mm filters and CPLs to my 150mm. However, the difference in filter size of my two lenses (B70 and B60) meant that I need filters of two sizes all the time. This means that I will need one 77mm CPL and one 62mm CPL for each of my lenses.

That does not make any money sense at all so the logical thing to do was to search for another adaptor, this time a step-up right from 62mm-77mm.

This way, I can now focus on getting standardized 77mm filters, CPLs for my lenses.

That’s not quite the end for me though.

To fit the bracket that holds up square filters, I need to add another adaptor. If it is my 150mm in use here then this is the third adaptor already.

This piece of 77mm adaptor holds the square filter bracket (at the background of the pic above).

So when you put all three together on a 150mm (B60), you have:

• B60-62mm
• 62m-77mm
• 77mm ring holder

The final product looks like this.

Notice that I did not really use my 50mm (B70) much as reference in this entry because B60 is a much more comment thread size in the Hasselblad series, especially if you are on a budget and uses CF lense. I use CFi lenses which are newer and thread size for 50mm is bigger at B70.

If you are using the older C lenses, they are mostly in B50 thread sizes and I don’t recommend that you build an adaptor set around them because C lenses are hard to repair due to lack of parts and you might have to ditch them in the future.

This is it. Nothing too complicating but you do need to wrap your head around it and fast if you are working in a ever-changing exposure shooting landscapes.

If you would like to find out more, I am happy to answer your questions via email.

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