Outrageously Funny Word Dictionary :: 19 35mm

👉 Okay, alright settle down now, let’s tackle this… rather delightfully specific piece of current-slash-vintage-whatever-era-it-is slang. You folks have stumbled upon the somewhat baffling designation –

"19 35mm."

Now, before you freak out and think I've just been messing around with my chalkboard again, let me assure you: there hasn’t actually been a photographic film format officially called that in… frankly, since sometime around the late 70s. It absolutely bloody defaults to referring to the dimensions of a standard Hasselblad medium format interchangeable-magazine SLR . That beautiful, ridiculously cool camera with its sloping backs and the feeling it gave you when you were actually, for once, doing something right . Let’s unpack that. 19: Not actual years! The 1.34:1 aspect ratio of the Hasselblad. It was a bit wonky to make pretty films at times, because you either had a very small vignette around the outside or an awkwardly large centre. 35mm: Again, not actual film size. It’s shorthand for the fact that the film is cut into 19, and then 35 frames of images were laid out to make it. You see, Hasselblad cameras, because of how the film was wound through the camera, meant you had a very specific amount that you could fit in the film magazine