Voigtlander Vito BL review by Richard de Bulat
Although small, the Vito BL has a nice weight and is easy to manage. The viewfinder is, essentially, a glass covered hole in the top and gives a slightly oversized frame from which to compose and shoot. The colour skopar lens has shutter-speed and aperture settings that lock together, (small adjuster tabs allow you to change the settings), that, in stable lighting conditions means you can adjust for different apertures and get the correct shutter speed at the same time. As there is no active viewfinder, you have to zone focus, setting your distance and using aperture/shutter speed to create a ‘zone’ of acceptable sharpness – good practice for budding street photographers!
The camera has its idiosyncrasies that involves loading and unloading the film, but when you know how it works it all makes sense and a good system to work with. Apart from that and zone focussing, it is easy and fast to use. I took a basic light reading set the camera to f8 at 125th sec and the focus distance to 20 ft. This gave me a zone of focus from 10 ft to just inside infinity. The light varied by 2 stops from time to time and I adjusted the aperture from f8 to f11 or f16 as conditions changed, leaving the focus range unchanged for the most part. Apart from a taking a couple of interior shots that needed adjustment outside of these parameters, I kept everything pretty much the same throughout the shoot.
For the shoot, I walked through the Royal William Yard and took the ferry to the Barbican, at which point I ran out of film and regretted not bringing a second roll with me. The camera is fun to use, it has a good weight and the looks and feel of a quality small camera from the 1950’s – a piece of history. There is a Bertram selenium cell light meter that appears to work, with an EV scale, but I used my own simply on the basis of reliability. The lens, which was considered very good in its day, lacks the sharpness we associate with modern lenses, but gives a definite character to the images that is very much old school and suited to gritty urban reportage. Shot at 200asa I could probably get finer grain with ID11, but Rodinal, although grainier, gives good edge sharpness.
The Royal William Yard is still undergoing reconstruction, especially around the arts area and is especially good in strong sunlight that was sadly lacking on this occasion. The ferry ride across the sound provides some good photo opportunities, whether the ferry is full or empty; on this trip there were a total of 7 people including the crew. Concerns over photographing people, even though it is a sort of public place, since its used by the public, it might, nevertheless, be a grey area, so pictures of crew working and recognisable faces have been left out. However, with enough ferry tokens, I think this would make a great photography project, especially if you could obtain permission and gain greater access. As it is, I had no difficulty shooting through a roll of film and think that this would be a good budget film camera to carry around while maintaining some useful analogue skills such as zone focusing and using E.V.’s.At the same time, I don’t think that this is a starter camera as it takes a little photographic knowledge to use it well, but rewards effort in this direction. Overall, this is a worthy camera to have in your collection.
