About this site
I'm Konrad Michels. I shoot medium-format Hasselblad systems through my studio Tonal Photo, with a Leica for when I want something lighter, and I write this blog about the engineering inside the cameras and software I use every day.
What I write about here comes from a deliberately unusual combination. I spent 30 years in software, including 12 at Meta, where I built infrastructure handling tens of billions of requests per second. In January 2025 I picked up a Hasselblad and discovered that almost nobody was writing about how this gear actually works at a system level. Most coverage is either marketing copy or YouTube reviews. The deeper story (how HNCS color science gets applied at render-time, why Phocus reprocesses on White Balance changes, what Hasselblad's HDR pipeline does that Canon and Sony can't) gets left to the application itself to explain. So I'm writing it down.
Hasselblad and Phocus 4.x for Mac coverage
The bulk of the content is Hasselblad and Phocus 4.x for Mac. Hasselblad's official Phocus documentation covers version 3.8, which leaves 4.x users without a real manual. The blog fills that gap, with empirically tested workflows for the X2D II, deep-dives into HNCS, HNNR, HDR capture and export, the 3FR/FFF format split, the Capture One hybrid workflow, and ongoing bug reproduction work for issues I've reported back to Hasselblad. Everything here is tested against the actual application, not paraphrased from product pages. Several of the Phocus bugs documented on this blog have been escalated to Hasselblad engineering, with engineering responses on record.
Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac: the paid guide
If you want the manual rather than the blog, I've published Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac. 83 topics organized the way you actually use the software, available as a pay-what-you-want digital download and as a paperback through Lulu.
The Hasselblad Companion newsletter
The Hasselblad Companion is a weekly newsletter on Phocus 4.x workflows, X2D II technical deep-dives, and new bug reports as they're investigated. Currently 600+ subscribers. Subscribing gets you:
- New posts in your inbox when they're published
- Full access to the archive
- No spam, no community forums, no upsells
Hasselblad workflow consulting
With 30 years in software and ongoing Phocus bug investigation work that has produced multiple reports escalated to Hasselblad engineering, I take on a small number of one-on-one consulting clients for Hasselblad workflow questions: Phocus 4.x setup and adjustments, RAW handling and sidecars, HDR capture and export, the Capture One hybrid workflow, backup and storage architecture for medium-format files, and the general "how should I organize this" questions that don't fit neatly into a blog post. I'm not a camera hardware tech and I won't pretend to be, but anything that involves the software, the files, or the workflow around them, I can help with.
If that's useful to you, email me at konrad@tonalphoto.com.
