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.