Voigtlander Vito B – a Recondite Romance

Voigtlander, oh Voigtlander, thou art but a cruel mistress. The Voigtlander Vito B is a marvellous camera that was produced between 1954 and 1959 giving it a relatively short production especially when you compare it to the Nikon F3 which was manufactured between 1980 and 2002! It is an incredibly compact camera that is not much bigger than a 35mm cassette making it easy to keep in the camera bag or carry around almost anywhere. I mean just look at it, would you not agree that it’s just so cute?

So why then do I call it a cruel mistress? Well simply because it is so hard for me to focus with it. It uses a rather classic zone focus system where you turn the lens to the distance of your subject and that’s it. The problem comes with the fact that the Vito B has an un-coupled viewfinder which makes gauging the distance and as-such the focus, rather difficult. Now for context, I am awful at judging how far away things are which is only slightly confounded when you take into fact that (as a British man) I work in meters while this copy of this German camera works in feet. Unfortunately not a match made in heaven. “Oh well” I think “how hard can it be?”. As it turns out, I took almost all of the images out of focus. But I had fun while doing it so who’s laughing? Not my wallet as you can probably guess.

Do not fret, my dear reader, for I am done complaining though my issues with focusing will become prevalent throughout this article. But now that we have discussed the perils of focusing, let’s move onto a brighter topic – exposing the film. Because of the camera’s compact nature, Voigtlander had to omit certain features – like a lightmeter. While it would be useful to have one, I don’t actually mind its removal as there’s multiple ways around it. For example, you can find multiple light meter apps on your phone (I typically use my light meter pro if I don’t have my Gossen Lunasix on hand) or you can use an external one like the popular kex models, and if you are feeling particularly old fashioned, you can use sunny sixteen. For those of you who don’t know, sunny sixteen is a technique where you estimate the exposure based on the sun and the clouds. The rough premise is that you take your ISO, get the closest shutter speed to it and adjust the aperture based on how bright it is. For example, in the above image, I was using Fomapan 100 so I chose 100th of a second, and it was a sunny day with some cloud cover so I went for F8. This trick works incredibly well for a quick and easy reading and it means that you don’t have to take a lightmeter with you, keeping the camera light and compact. Plus it can save you if your lightmeter fails halfway through a roll of film.

Loading this camera is incredibly easy as it has got a little hinged door that swings open when you open the back, which allows you to slide the cassette in and out of the camera. After that, you load it in the same fashion as most other film cameras. Just be careful as it is possible to catch a bit of the film in the door if the cassette is not seated correctly, ask me how I know. However the Vito B has a trick up its sleeve. This is to say that it uses the film to cock the shutter instead of the film advance lever. A rather clever way to keep the size down, good job Voigtlander. It does come with the slight caveat that you can’t test the shutter without loading a film first. On the topic of the shutter, the Vito B has a decent if not slightly limited range of speeds going from one second to a maximum of 1/300th of a second which can make shooting in summer a tad interesting if you are using a 400 ISO film. Although it is rare in Britain to get a sunny enough day for such an issue.

So would I recommend this camera? The answer is maybe. While it is a lovely machine with lots of charm, ingenuity and can create some beautiful images it is a bit lacking in areas and not having a coupled rangefinder is a bit of a diss-advantage in my opinion. With that being said, you can pick up a decent condition one for around £30 to £40 which is not a huge investment and it’s rather bare bones, stripped down style is a lot of fun to shoot. It forces you to slow down even further and really think about the image; after all isn’t that what we use film for? To slow down the ever-increasing motorway we call life? 

Thank you for reading my ramblings, I am going to heat up my cup of tea as it seems to have gone rather cold while writing this. Might have to open a pack of chocky biscuits too. If you like my work then you can find my full Flickr stream here (most of the images are in focus I swear) and my instagram here. Once again, thank you for reading, have a wonderful day and Happy shooting.

Share this post: