Voigtländer Vito II

 

When our parents met, both had cameras. Mom had a pretty traditional Brownie-style box camera, and Dad had a camera that I still use today: a Voigtländer Vito II. 

 

Dad was a veteran of the second world war. He landed in Normandy at Courseulles-sur-Mer and as part of B-Company of the 12th Platoon of the Highland Light Infantry of Canada, 9th Canadian Brigade, part of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, he participated in the battles of Caen, Buron, Falaise, Boulogne, Cap-Gris-Nez, the Scheldt, Bresekns Pocket, the Rhineland, Waal Flats, the Hochwald, The Rhine, Zutphen and Leer. He had great respect for German design and technology: a quality radio was a Telefunken, when we were young, he drove a Volkswagen, and his camera of choice was the Voigtländer.

 

This early 1950’s folding camera, using 135 film in cassettes (what became commonly known as 35mm), is a wonder of efficiency.  In a compact form that easily fits in a pocket, high quality photos were possible, with a lens designed to be used with colour film as well as black-and-white.

 

After Mom’s Brownie, or an Instamatic, the Vito II was the first “real” camera that many of us in the family got to use.  My brother Rob not only used the Vito extensively in the early 1970s, he built a darkroom in the basement laundry room, to develop film and print photos.

 

Here’s a photo of Rob a couple of months ago, taken with the circa-1952 Vito II:

 

My first darkroom experience was watching Rob and his pals working in the basement, magically making images appear under a red light. The first pictures I took with this camera were developed and printed in the converted laundry room in our basement of the grandparents house.

 

By today’s standards, the Vito II is a lot more complex to operate.  There is no autofocus, you need to estimate or calculate distance, though the camera’s focusing ring has handy markings for zone focusing: a triangle at 11 ft for snapshots and a circle at 33 ft for landscape photos. The camera does not have metering either, so your choices are to guess, use the sunny 16 rule, or get a handheld light meter. 

 

I took the Vito II on my first international trip in 1978 to Finland and the USSR.  Here is photo from Leningrad, and my first crap attempt at photo scanning a decade ago:

 

Below are the first photos from the Voigtländer Vito II, shot at and around the Calvaire d’Oka, a one-time pilgrimage site north-east of Montreal, with a view of lac des Deux Montagnes, taken at the end of summer 2022, the first time the camera had been used in more than 4 decades.