Picture this, you're eight years old and strapped into a cardboard box your parent brought home from work.  You have painstakingly painted booster rockets on the outside, and you've crammed the inside full with everything you will need for your imaginary trip to the Moon: empty sandwich baggies for rock specimens, a warm sweater because it's cold in space, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Your neighbor cut a seat belt out of an old car and helped you fit in your younger siblings's booster seat.  As you nervously countdown the waning seconds til the giant engines ignite, flinging you out of Earth's gravity and on your way to the Moon, you may not realize that you are missing one vital piece of equipment: a camera.  At eight years old, this is understandable.  You've seen your parents tinker with their cameras from time to time, but you don't yet have much concept of the importance of a camera on this mission, let alone which camera would be best suited.  Unbeknownst to you, that camera is out there and it has already been to the Moon.  This camera, of course, is the Hasselblad 500 EL/M, the camera that would later be updated by the 500 ELX.

Produced between 1984-1988, the ELX remains faithful to the EL/M that it was based upon.  In fact, the only two significant changes that the ELX introduced were the addition of a TTL flash metering system and a larger mirror in the camera body, so that telephoto lenses would no longer vignette.  Other than that, the ELX kept everything good about the previous EL/M.  Unlike the more common Hasselblad 500C and 500C/M, the ELX is a motorized beast of a Hasselblad.  Attached to its base is a large, battery-powered winder that not only advances the film after each exposure, but also resets the mirror and sets the shutter in the lens.  While the size and weight of these motorized Hasselblads has deterred many photographers from using them as carry-around-cameras, they have proven their worth as an incredibly reliable studio camera.  The ELX winds the film and resets itself after each exposure, without the need for the photographer to remain stationed behind the camera.  The inclusion of a TTL flash sensor in the ELX only adds to its strengths.

So, if you come to the realization that your space craft is missing the camera necessary to document your mission, and it is not too late to delay the countdown, go after the Hasselblad 500 EL/X.  Its motorized winding will be a great boon in the cumbersome space sweater you will be wearing and its weight will be greatly offset by the overall lack of gravity in space.

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