I point my Hasselblad True Zoom Mod camera through the dirty windshield of our Toyota Prado as we head north into the Nicaraguan highlands. I’m expecting the worst, as our vehicle jostles and I try to hold steady on a moving target, from a moving target. I just landed in the country last night and just now fit the camera onto a Moto Z Verizon phone, which has already found the local Movistar carrier and linked in. It all snaps together and the weight of the camera feels good in my hands.
We are driving through Sébaco, pointed toward the Jinotega highlands and a series of coffee farms we’ll be visiting. I was planning to test this camera out mostly on the farms, zooming in on the red, ripe, coffee berries—but there’s something about this little girl on the back of the motorcycle… This is full zoom, through a dirty windshield:
This photo was the beginning of my brief love affair with the Hasselblad. We spent five days traveling in the Jinotega coffee-producing highlands of Nicaragua, as well as in Managua and a final-day B-roll tour of Masaya and Granada (for extra color). As the production fixer for a small run-and-gun camera crew traveling in a 5-vehicle caravan of coffee executives, it wasn’t my job to be taking pictures, so I snapped ’em when I could and offer this rough gallery.
For a more detailed phone camera vs. phone camera analysis, read “The Google Pixel, iPhone 7 Plus, and Moto Z go head to head, from a traveler’s perspective” by Nikki Ekstein.
I kept my Hasselblad Mod attached to my phone all week, and was impressed how the few hundred shots I took automatically uploaded to my Google site while connected to WiFi at night in the hotels. It can shoot in RAW format and the 10x optical zoom lens was a game-changer from my finger-pinch zooming past.
