Week 35: The Voigtländer incident

One of my goals in this project is to use all of the film cameras that I have either acquired or were given to me. One of the last “classics” on the list is a Voigtländer Vito C given to me by my neighbor. It is a beautiful camera made is West Germany sometime in the early 60’s. When I first received the camera I ran a roll through it with no issues. So now it was this camera’s turn in this project.

I loaded the camera up with some run of the mill Fuji 200 film because I knew I was going out to a well lit park. Let me describe what I saw. At first, we went to the park and I took pictures of my daughters on the path. Some nice perspective shots with wonderful leading lines, etc. Next, while near the river, there were butterflies resting on bright yellow flowers. After that, children on the playground. Nice compositional shots with everything set just right. After that we stumbled across a Hispanic church performing baptisms in the river. Brightly colored participants, waist deep in the water; reflections showing on the flowing river…

OK, so why did I go to such lengths to describe the scene? The winding mechanism didn’t work correctly so every time I though I was advancing the frame: nothing. Here are the results from the first roll:

24 exposure roll and all I got back from the lab was 1 and half frames…

Not defeated, I loaded another roll of the same film stock. This time more success but the combination of exposure and focus distance appeared to be my undoing.