Voigtlander Vito II

My uncle had a few film cameras he'd found here and there and online and he lent me two of them to see what kind of shape they were in.  One of them is a Voigtlander Vito II, which I ran a test roll of TMax 400@1600 through.

I already have a bunch of gear marked "Voigtlander" but it's from a completely different era.  The Voigtlander name (I'll be lazy about the umlaut) has been around since 1756, founded in Austria as a mathematical instruments company that made astrolabes and quadrants for nautical navigation, and then moving on to optics in the 1800's.

Since then, the brand has been bounced around from Zeiss in 1956, to Rollei in 1972, and finally to Cosina in Japan in 1999.  This model was produced in 1949, and aside from needing a tuneup, it's working pretty okay.

It's a bellows folder camera that takes 35mm film with a 50mm f/3.5 lens.  The lens itself is alright -- it's got the usual old school quirks like the "glow" and the soft corners.

Pretty much everything happens on that front assembly -- you cock the shutter, set the shutter speed and aperture, focus, and shoot on the front of the camera.  The only thing that happens on the back is winding the film with the big knobs on top.

The cool thing is that it folds up and goes right in your pocket.  I wouldn't exactly call it a quickdraw camera, but the operation is actually really easy and one-button.

My Voigtlander Bessa R2A is a rangefinder, but on this camera the viewfinder is basically just a hole through the camera like on the Holga.  You have to "zone focus" it -- you look at the front of the camera, set the focus to a certain distance, and walk about that distance from the subject, and then you take the picture.  Zone focusing basically a fancy way to say, "just eyeball it".  It gets easier when you use smaller apertures like f/8, which is why I'm pushing the TMax.  Also, you get used to counting sidewalk segments and crosswalk lines.

The thing about this particular camera is that the front assembly has a bit of a wobble, so I have to hold it in place while shooting.  Sometimes I forget, and the focus goes off a la tilt-shift.  I'm sure there's just a screw somewhere in there that needs tightening, but I'm not going to tinker with a camera I don't own.

Anyway, it was fun messing around with the Vito II.  Getting to handle all these different types of cameras might seem like a bit of a hassle, but it's all an effort to become gear-independent.  Whether I'm shooting film or digital or wide or telephoto, I'm hoping to find my stylistic thumbprint in the chaos.