Single Roll Review: Voigtlander Bessa II
This is a camera review I have been waiting 10 months to write. Just after the new year I started getting interested in folding cameras. I had acquired a broken Kodak Retina 1a in a “$100 box of cameras” trade and was hoping to find something in usable condition at a garage sale before we started the road trip I’ve been blogging about the past 10 weeks. Most of the folders I was looking at online take medium format film, which is about twice the size of typical 35 mm film. This is important because the image is larger and allows much greater detail to be captured, which would also allow an image to be cropped tighter when desired without losing much of the overall detail that does happen quickly when cropping 35mm images. The size of these negatives is silly. A 35 mm negative is 24mm x 36mm, and these 120 negatives are 60mm x 90mm.
This past May, I was driving around while waiting for some film to be developed in Livonia when I saw an estate sale sign. It was getting late, and I decided to pop in just in case there was something cool. Immediately when I walked in the door, I saw what many aficionados consider to be the best folding camera ever made, a Voigtlander Bessa II (1950-1956). After some negotiation I ended up walking out the door with this camera, an Ansel Adams framed calendar page and a new film scanner. I got to the car and within 5 minutes of owning this amazing camera, I closed it improperly and damaged it beyond usability. My dream of shooting a medium format photo in Yosemite was dead. Fortunately, there are still some very talented repair guys out there working on this kind of stuff and can fix people’s mistakes. I sent it off to Jurgen Kreckel at Certo6 just before we left for vacation and after being at his shop for about a month it came back looking good as the day I found it, and working as good as the day it came out of Germany. Since I had waited so long, I wanted to make sure I didn’t damage it again. I found the original manual online; it was the worst written user manual I have ever read. So, I did what every other person on the world does in 2023 and watched every YouTube video I could find. I feel confident I know everything I need to know about late 1950’s German folding cameras at this point, both medium format and 35mm.
It's a tricky thing to use an almost 70-year-old mechanical camera, and even trickier to try and use it at “Blue Hour”. Most photographers know the best light is the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, “Golden Hour”. I decided to try out a new-to-me camera and medium speed film an hour after sunset, because why not. With a slow lens and fast fading light the shutter speed had to be open much longer than I usually can get clean images from, and 6 of the 8 from this roll are extremely blurry. The two that mostly turned out made me happy enough I decided I need to take this out to shoot fall colors in the very near future. The experience was very cool and has really helped me understand the draw to using these large obsolete cameras. It’s not necessarily about making perfect photos, it’s about creating something using tools most people walk by at a garage sale or throw away entirely. After this quick impromptu photo walk I know I need to use a tripod and have better light instead of trying to make do with just a monopod and the hope I could keep it steady. Expect more from this camera in the future, along with whatever else I find at your garage sales. I promise the next shots will be better.
