I discovered a few weeks ago that I had stored my lovely old Voigtlander CL camera with some film in it. It looks like a 1950-60s rangefinder, but it's not. But it's far from a fixed or even zone-focus box camera. Its permanently mounted f2.8 50mm Lanthar lens (the base lens for this model) closes down to f22, with no detents at whole or half stops -- meaning it has an infinite number of intermediate settings. How could you possibly need those? The better to line up the match-needle light meter on the upper right top deck of the camera. Shutter speeds from 1/15th of a second to 1/500th (plus Bulb) are available. And the meter can be set for ISOs from 10 to 800. You're thinking it probably uses a meter battery no longer available, but no. No batteries whatsoever. The meter is powered by a selenium cell array on the right front side (still working perfectly in my copy). Here's a webpage with more info on the model:
Voigtl
I thought I had taken some number of pictures on the loaded roll, maybe because I wasn't reading the frame counter correctly, but I got nearly a full twenty-four on the remaining film. The few forgettable exposures were when this usual SLR user forgot to estimate and set the focus distance a few times, since the viewfinder is always in focus and doesn't remind one to do that. The film turned out to be a roll of Fujicolor 200. I'm guessing that I loaded it in the camera 1-2 years ago, when the film may have either been new of not very expired. All of the exposures made use of the built-in meter, which seemed accurate enough when compared to an external meter before I set off to take these pictures.
These shots are all taken around the little town of Avon, Illinois:
I LIKE that tiny starburst between the tree trunks in the last shot. I don't know if it is an artifact of the branch configuration or of the Lanthar 50mm's aperture blades. I'll have to see if I can get that to happen again.
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Last edited by goatsNdonkey; 03-02-2017 at 02:17 PM.