My first camera

So this is the first such blogpost, others will follow over the coming weeks/months as I try out the old cameras. Attic, here I come.

My first camera was a 1937 Voigtlander like this one. I could no longer find it in the attic, so I'm showing you a photo from the web. It was small enough to fit in a dufflecoat pocket / outside pocket of a motorcycle touring jacket. It opened up for use via bellows, had 3 or 4 shutter speeds, adjustable apertures and bellows focus. It used a type 120 paper film roll, taking (12?) B&W pictures in 6*6 and/or 6*9 cms size. It also had an interesting history.

During WW 2 my father had a UK tank which they drove south down the length of Norway, pushing the German forces back into Germany via Denmark, he told me. Somewhere along the way they captured some German soldiers who had this camera and confiscated the camera from the POW. At the end of the war, he "forgot" to turn it in, regarding it as "war booty" ; so basically he stole it from the POW.

In my childhood we lived out in the country, meaning we were 20 miles or so from the nearest photo shop to buy film rolls and had no car, so the camera was barely used. However, I do have one B&W family photo, taken, developed and printed about 70 years ago.

Back row : father and mother, Middle row : Mother's mother, Father's mother, who lived with us as they were both war widows, Bottom row : Yours truly, holding Smokey the cat, and my sister. I guess I was about 7 at the time and my sister 3. Photo taken by a neighbour using that camera.

The photo is fuzzy, but used to be better, it seems to have deteriorated over the last 70 years. When I turned 18 my father gave me the camera, I took it to the Isle of Man 2 years later to the TT races, so should have some B&W photos of the TT racing back then, but can't find them :-(

You can still buy 120 B&W film rolls here in Germany, so if I ever find the camera again I'll take some photos with it and belatedly post them here :-)

At university we had a class in technical photography, including developing films & plates and printing positives from them. Nothing as artistic as e.g. friend Doug Alder always produces. We also learned how to mill and turn and how to design and make our own printed circuits so that we were able to make our own experimental equipment. There I used this camera to photograph my home-built microwave waveguide impedance tranformer; the photo quality was adequate for my thesis in 1965; scan of 1965 photo below.

Comments (2)
Cop Car wrote " While I made the dress that Dudette is wearing in the photo to which you were kind enough to link, I did not take the photo. It was taken by a professional studio. OTOH: At Cop Car's Beat: April 2021 (typepad.com) is a photo, taken three years later, of our younger daughter Bogie, which Hunky Husband took and printed when we lived in the Seattle, Washington, area. I believe he used a Pentax H-3V #5-36-U Camera, purchased (used) in 1964. The deterioration of your family photo is too bad. It’s a great memento." Thanks for the feedback, but see Jenny's suggestion, below.
Jenny (Ibiza) suggests " I suggest the deterioration is due to you scanning a framed photo (through glass). Try taking a photo of that same framed photo from a distance. Wear a black T-shirt to reduce any reflexions. See if that helps." If it does I'll post the result below :-)

Jenny your suggestion was excellent. This version is only slightly worse than the original. Thankyou for educating me :-)

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