Message is a bottle

In September, the kids and I spent an hour or so on a bend in the Salt Fork river a few miles from our house. The river is higher in the spring and is lower in the summer and fall months.This particular spot is out in the middle of the river, and an is on the edge of an island of tree branches and brambles trapped together. The kids like to look for shells along the river banks, and this spot is always great for finding a plethora of shells of all kinds.

Logan looking for shells along the Salt Fork River. I made this picture with my Pentax SPII 35mm camera.

This year the water was exceptionally low. We haven't had a lot of rain this spring and summer, so lots of shells are exposed and laying around on what used to be the river bottom.

Among the shells, rocks and other things exposed by the low water was a bottle sticking out of the muck. It caught my eye, because it was a nice shade of teal blue thick glass. When I pulled it out I was surprised to see that it was still intact. After looking it over for a few minutes I was going to leave it be, but the "clean up nature" person inside me (and the curious historian) decided to pick it up and take it home.

Beautiful Dudenhofer bottle found in the mud in the Salt Fork River.

On the side of the bottle is written: "This Bottle Filled By Dudenhofer Bottling Co. Danville, ILL"

There isn't much on the Net about the Dudenhofer Bottling Company. A biography of George Dudenhofer states that he started the bottling company in 1901 in Danville. Another source from an article about these particular bottles states that the company ceased production of bottles at the Danville location in January of 1919.

This particular bottle has a large square "D" on the bottom of the bottle, but no date of manufacture anywhere on the glass. It is thick and irregular, and has whisps in the glass as well as some air bubbles trapped during the bottle making process.

It is a great little bottle! I can only imagine how it ended up empty, resting in the bottom of the Salt Fork River some time about 100 years ago. The amazing thing is that this bottle stayed together, and has hardly any signs of abuse at all.

When I find the time, I would love to do more research on the Dudenhofer Bottling Company in Danville. I imagine a trip to the library and some mircofilm is in order :) But then again, that to me is the fun part about finding a piece of history.

Balda Super Baldina: Shootin 1950's style

I received a text message from my good friend Anne. It read "What's a Balda?" She found this nice little chrome camera at the local Goodwill store, and wanted to tell me about it.

She sent along a picture with her text message. At first I thought it was a medium format camera, because it looked too big for 35mm. Well I was wrong, this cute little camera is actually a 35mm rangefinder camera from postwar Germany.

She said I would probably like shooting with it, so she sent it off to me to add to my antique camera collection. Thanks Anne!

As with anything in my life, first came the research on this camera. Tracking down the history of the camera is just part of the fun.

The camera was made by the Western Balda Company in the 1950's, and christened with the name Super Baldina. It has a collapsible lens that snaps into the camera body, and is a split image range finder camera. It was made in a few different versions. This version has one of the more common three element Baldanar 2.8 50mm lenses. If you would like to read more about this camera you can check out an article here.

The cute little 35mm Balda with the lens extended in the shooting position.

The camera came in half of it's original case, but it is in remarkably good shape. It probably sat around  for a while, but has wear marks which show that it was used quite a bit. The rewind knob on the left side of the camera has worn through the printed text on top of the dial from rewinding lots of film.

$6.38, not bad :)

You can see the wear marks from rewinding lots of film in this camera.

A sticker inside the camera from McCurry Foto Co. in Sacramento, California.

I cleaned the front elements of the lens, and cleaned the front and rear glass on the viewfinders and rangefinder windows. I did a run though on the shutter speeds and apertures. The slow speeds seemed a little off (slow) so I stuck to shutter speeds 1/60 and up to be on the safe side. The big question mark for this camera was the rangefinder. It is a series of mirrors that reflects light into the viewfinder, and allows you to superimpose two images together in order to focus the camera. Not knowing if the rangefinder was calibrated (or if the camera had been dropped down a flight of stairs in its lifetime), I put a roll of my favorite black and white film in the camera (Arista.edu Ultra 200 or Foma 200) and took it for a walk in the woods with the kids.

And the results: WOW! The camera is amazing. The rangefinder was in perfect calibration, as I made images both close up and far away to test out the focusing abilities. My biggest surprise was the sharpness of this lens. The photos are tack sharp, amazingly sharp to be honest, especially coming from a consumer grade camera from the 1950's.This camera is all metal and glass, no plastic and no batteries. It is very well made and worked flawlessly. Not bad for a 60 year old camera!

A picture of my kids perfectly focused, with out of focus elements in the foreground and background.

The lens did great with this closeup. And beautiful details in the whites of the flowers.

A landscape shot of the lake. I wish I would have had a red filter to punch up the clouds in the sky.