This Space for Rent

It has my pictures of the day, but it’s not giving them up

Voightlander Vito BL

I took my grandfather’s Voigtländer out as my runaround camera this afternoon, and because it’s a film camera this means that any picture I managed to successfully take will be kept hidden away until I’ve finished with the roll of film and have sent the thing off to be developed.

It’s going to be interesting to see if any of the pictures turn out; the Vito BL is an all manual camera, so I have to have the diaphragm, range (and, since it’s a viewfinder, I have to either use an auxilary rangefinder or eyeball the range,) and exposure all properly set before anything actually turns out. But it’s very quiet compared to a SLR (even my teeny little Pentax 110 is louder) and it’s much lighter than my *istDS.

I have *got* to make a digital back for this camera. Perhaps I should do a startup that makes digital backs for old film cameras; not everyone would want a camera back that just takes pictures and has a review screen, but there are plenty of old film cameras out there that are still used by people who don’t feel deprived if they don’t get the huge stack of presets and features that any f the modern SLRs have got.

And, shoot, a Leica M8 costs US$5500; if I had a M6 lying around, I’d think that spending anything under US$4000 would be a pretty good price for a digital back for an existing better-than-sex™ camera.