When Swedish Air Force officers discovered a surveillance camera inside a German reconnaissance aircraft they’d shot down in 1940, they went to Victor Hasselblad, who’d been educated in Dresden, and asked if he could produce something similar. His response – “No, but I could make a better one” – remains emblematic to Hasselblad employees to this day, says Benny Buchtrup.

Buchtrup heads up the newly created Special Applications Department, tasked with developing products and services designed to meet the needs of photographers working in niche fields. Appropriately, its initial focus is on aerial imaging. “It’s an area that we know a bit about, and we already have a product that has been adapted, over the years, for their needs,” he says, modestly failing to mention that the HK7 Hasselblad, designed in a shed for the Swedish military, was not so different to the camera it made for NASA 25 years later, and which in 1969 was used by astronauts to record the first moon landing.

Hasselblad recently realised there was enough interest from aerial photographers and other specialist users of its products to create a special division. “We felt that we needed to devote extra attention to photographers working outside of the more conventional photography field,” says Buchtrup. “Often, their requests can be more complex and need a greater amount of research to produce a solution. They might be on the fringe of conventional photography, but deserve our full attention.”

The division hopes to gain more insight into specialist Hasselblad users. “We want to take a closer look at them and figure out why they use us, what they like about our products and what they don’t like about them. Also, from a sales standpoint, the more you know about your customers, the better you can service their markets.”

While Hasselblad doesn’t expect to produce specific product lines for all niche areas, as it has done in the aerial photography field, it plans to offer solutions to make life easier for specialist photographers. Aerial photographers benefit from a dedicated system, though, the Hasselblad H4D Aerial system. Based on the firm’s conventional medium format camera, it uses “special locking mechanisms to provide secure mounting of all system components to counteract aircraft vibration”. Hasselblad has also used specialised production methods to ensure “an extreme level of sensor and image plane positioning accuracy”.

Hasselblad recently issued a specific firmware for aerial photographers that locks up the mirror once the power is switched on, because “some aerial photographers – especially in the mapping industry – don’t look into the viewfinder to take pictures. Locking the mirror up reduces the delay in triggering,” says Buchtrup. “And it also reduces camera shake.”

Hasselblad also makes a Software Development Kit for to photographers who want to build their own specialised applications to control the camera. “For some applications, users won’t want to use the Hasselblad interface,” because it will, in some cases, apply corrections to images. “These users might just need to capture and store the images, choosing to apply their own corrections and algorithms afterwards. The SDK allows for these users to scale down the interface to the bare minimum.”

In fact, such an application already exists. Called Continuum, it allows operators to gain easy access to the camera’s controls via a computer without needing to run Hasselblad’s Phocus software. According to Buchtrup, Hasselblad plans on making Continuum available to all users via its Special Applications Department website.

“A lot of companies using our cameras modify them for their own purposes,” says Buchtrup. “But since they go directly to our dealers, we never get to know why they’re buying our cameras. We want them to know that there’s now a place where they can come and talk to us. We have customers in many other niches beyond aerial photography, and some of them might actually benefit from the same sort of resources.”

This feedback and extended collaboration could also benefit core users, adds Buchtrup. “The next time we release a new camera model, we might take that insight into consideration.”

Visit www.hasselbladaerial.com.