This was another auction find. I had bought a box of cameras hoping for one or two things and the Bessa was not on the listing. It was at the bottom of the box and filthy, with what turned out to be a thick layer of fungus inside the front element of the lens. Three weeks of careful cleaning later I had a razor sharp lens and a working shutter, and the Bessa had turned out to be one of my favourite cameras in the cupboard.
I have already covered the lens disassembly and the fungus removal in a separate piece. This article is the shoot and the review.
What the Bessa I is
The Voigtländer Bessa I was made in Braunschweig from 1951 to 1956. Voigtländer shifted somewhere around eighty thousand units across the production run, which puts it in the middle of the pack for a medium format folder of the period. The Bessa I sold alongside the Bessa II, which had a coupled rangefinder built into the top plate. Both cameras replaced the older Bessa RF, which had been in production through to 1949. The I and II ran in parallel as the budget and premium options of the same basic camera.
The Bessa I shoots 6x9 negatives on 120 film. With the optional 6x4.5 mask in the film bay (which I do not have) you can switch to the smaller format and double your frame count. Without the mask you get eight 6x9 frames per roll. A 6x9 negative is enormous. It works out at about fifty-four square centimetres of film, which is six times the area of a 35mm frame. The aspect ratio is also identical to 35mm at 1:1.5, which means a 6x9 print scales up to the same proportions as an enlargement off a 135 negative, with vastly more silver to play with.
There were two lens options. The Vaskar 105mm f/4.5 is a three-element triplet design with coating but no specific colour correction. The Color-Skopar 105mm f/3.5 is a four-element Tessar design with colour correction in the name and half a stop more aperture, and it is generally considered the better optic. Mine is the Vaskar. The cheaper one. The reviews I have read say the Color-Skopar pulls noticeably ahead below f/8 and the two lenses are much closer at the apertures you actually use on a folder of this kind. So I am not too sad about having the Vaskar.
Shutter options also varied. With the Vaskar lens the camera was offered with the Pronto, Prontor-S or Prontor-SV. With the Color-Skopar you got the Prontor-S, Prontor-SV, Prontor-SVS, or a Synchro-Compur for the top of the range. Mine has the Prontor-S, which gives one second to 1/250 of a second plus bulb. The slow speeds have got sticky in the way old leaf shutters always do, and what is marked as half a second is closer to a full second now. The faster speeds from 1/25 upwards are accurate enough not to worry about.
The Bessa I has no rangefinder. You scale focus by estimating distance and setting the focus ring on the lens collar. For static subjects at moderate apertures this is not really a problem. For closer subjects with the lens wide open it absolutely is. I picked up a small cold-shoe rangefinder accessory to clip on top of the camera and that solves most of the problem.
Surprisingly clever for 1951
There are two design choices on the Bessa I that I did not expect.
The first is the double exposure prevention. There is a small window on the top plate near the wind knob, with an arrow inside it. After you have wound on past a click stop, the arrow points up towards the shutter release, telling you the camera is ready to fire. Once you fire, the arrow rotates and points sideways to tell you to wind on. The shutter release physically will not depress until you have wound on. This is a genuinely elegant mechanism for 1951 and one I have not seen on cameras twenty years newer.
The second is the viewfinder masking system. The viewfinder gives you four different frame masks: one each for 6x9 and 6x4.5 at infinity, and one each at a one-metre minimum focus distance. You slide a small lever on the top plate and the relevant mask drops into the viewfinder. The infinity-versus-one-metre options exist because the viewfinder is not coaxial with the lens, and the parallax error between what you see and what the lens sees grows large enough at close distance to be worth correcting for. Four masks in a 1951 folder for parallax correction is seriously thoughtful engineering. Voigtländer were not messing about.
The film bay is also clean by the standards of the era. The light seals are felt rather than the rubber-foam stuff that turns to goo on later cameras, and on mine they have held up remarkably well after seventy years. The bellows are leak-free and have stayed flexible enough that I am happy folding and unfolding the camera repeatedly without worrying about pinholes.
Loading and walking the camera into Chepstow
I loaded a roll of FP4 Plus and drove down to Chepstow. The plan had been to take some quaint town shots and get a feel for how the Vaskar and the shutter behaved at distance, up close and on a long exposure. I had not really worked out a route. I walked from the high street down towards the river and ended up underneath Chepstow Castle on the wooded side. I had only ever seen the castle from across the river before. The west side is heavily wooded and falls away steeply down to the path. On a misty October morning it was wonderfully atmospheric.
Chepstow Castle is the oldest surviving stone castle in Britain, with the keep dating to 1067. The Bessa, at seventy years old, is the younger of the two structures by a wide margin. That felt appropriate.
The first frame went on the castle through the trees at 1/100 at f/7, focused at infinity. The mist was still hanging in the trees and the light was flat and soft. I wound on. Eight frames per roll means you spend a lot of time thinking before you press the button. The frame budget on a Bessa is closer to a large format frame budget than a 35mm one.
I set up a second frame using bulb mode for a longer exposure. Aperture at f/16 for depth of field, an estimated one-second-and-a-bit count, lens stopped down properly, focus set carefully on the castle wall. Bulb on a leaf shutter is a curious experience because there is no visible mirror and no audible shutter slap. Just a small click as the blades open and a second click as they close. You count out loud or in your head, and you hope.
Further down the path I tried to incorporate some people into the foreground. There were a couple of walkers coming up the path. I waved them down and asked if they would mind walking past the camera while I exposed. The Bessa took two more frames of strangers walking past the castle, both shot at moderate apertures with the rangefinder accessory clipped on for a sanity check on focus.
By the end of the roll the mist had burned off and the light was harder. I had used six of the eight frames and decided to call it. I wanted to develop the FP4 fresh and see how the Vaskar had behaved before I committed the rest.
Looking at the negatives
The negatives are good. Excellent, in fact. The Vaskar at f/16 in the kind of overcast soft light I had is sharp from edge to edge. The mist scene at f/7 is a touch softer but still well within the range of what I would expect from a 105mm triplet from the early 1950s. The bulb exposure metered out about right and the tonal range across the long shadows is wider than I would have guessed.
The frames with people in the foreground are the ones where the focus is less reliable. I had used the cold-shoe rangefinder for those and the rangefinder is not calibrated. It is slightly out and I had not yet worked out by how much. The result is that the people are not quite as sharp as they could have been. Not a Bessa problem. A me-and-the-rangefinder problem.
I am also fairly sure the focus collar on the lens itself could do with a small adjustment. Infinity feels marginal. It is the kind of thing that an hour with a piece of ground glass on the film plane would sort out, and I will get round to it.
What I think of it
I am keeping the Bessa. The decision was not really in question by the time I had developed the roll. I do not have anything in the cupboard that gives me sharp 6x9 negatives that I can focus deliberately. My other 6x9 cameras are box cameras and they do what box cameras do, which is fix everything at the hyperfocal distance of a fairly slow fixed-aperture lens. The Bessa is the first 6x9 in the collection where I can stop down for depth of field and focus on something specific. It is also the first that I can run a long bulb exposure through on a tripod. That is the gap it fills, and it fills it well.
The form factor also helps. Folded, the Bessa is genuinely bag-friendly. Open, it is large for a 120 folder but lighter and less awkward than a TLR of the same era and a hundred times lighter than the Bronica. The engineering is clean and the thoughtful touches like the viewfinder masks and the double exposure prevention suggest a camera designed by people who actually used cameras.
Things I would change. The rangefinder accessory needs calibrating, which is a five-minute job once I have decided how. The slow shutter speeds also want re-timing (the camera repair guides recommend a flush of lighter fluid through the escapement, which usually fixes the gum). Beyond that the camera is in solid shape.
Would I recommend you buy one? Yes, with two notes. Get the Color-Skopar version if you can find one in good condition at a sensible price, because the lens is genuinely better below f/8. If you cannot, the Vaskar is a perfectly capable lens and at the price difference between the two variants you can afford to be patient and wait for the right Color-Skopar to come along. Either way you get a camera that fits in a bag and produces a fifty-four square centimetre negative. There is not much else from this era that delivers as much frame for as little camera.
The next outing for the Bessa is going to be properly planned. I want to take it somewhere where the 6x9 frame and the long focal length work in my favour. Probably a coastal walk somewhere with big skies and a long horizon. The Bessa is not really an urban camera. It wants space.