More from the Felica

 

The Felica is compact and easy to carry.  The focusing and exposure adjustments are limited, but adequate for dealing with a pretty good range of circumstances.  I haven't yet made much use of the built-in yellow filter, so I'll try to look for opportunities for using it with my next roll through the camera.

Back to Basics

 I have been wanting to get back to shooting some of my simple cameras, so I thought to start with my Vredeborch Felica.  Though hardly bigger than my Ansco Panda, it sports adjustments for distance, speed and aperture.  The lens looks to be a simple meniscus type, but the curved film plane helps with sharpness out to the edges.

I got out into our yard before getting caught up in my usual morning routine at the computer and shot up all twelve frames on the roll of Fomapan 100 in about twenty minutes. 

The thing that makes taking pictures fun with these simple cameras is that they always produce images that exceed expectations if some care is taken in choosing subjects that are a good match for film speed and the camera's capabilities.  In addition to which, in this case, it is fun to say "Vredeborch Felica". *

* From Ask Oracle:

Felica is a name with a rich history and diverse origins, primarily associated with the Latin word "felix" meaning "happy" or "lucky." It has been used as a given name for both girls and boys throughout history, though it is more common for girls today. The name holds a sense of joy, prosperity, and good fortune, making it a popular choice for parents seeking a name with positive connotations.

Felica is easy to write and pronounce, with a pleasant sound and a timeless feel. It has a few common nicknames like Fely, Fee, and Lica, adding a touch of familiarity and endearment. While not as common as some other names, it still holds a unique charm and a connection to historical figures and literary characters.

and

From Camera-wiki.org:

Vredeborch was a camera maker based in Nordenham, a town on the German North Sea coast. The name of the company come from the Vredeborch castle (Friedeburg in standard German; Peace Castle in English) established at the beginning of the city's history, circa 1407. The company Vredeborch GmbH was founded in 1945. Several of its cameras were sold under names given by other distributors. It stopped camera-making in 1970. 

(They made a lot of medium format camera models in twenty-five years.  I wonder if anyone has collected all of them. )

The Church of Ansel

We spent a couple days in Taos.  I've been there several times over the years we have lived in New Mexico, but I've never taken the time before to explore the place with my cameras.  I decided on this occasion that I would devote a chunk of time to one subject, the San Francisco de Asis church south of town.  Ansel Adams and Paul Strand immortalized the place early in the last century.  It seemed a nice opportunity to see what they saw and to develop some appreciation of how they approached the subject and how they interpreted it.

The first thing that struck me was that the church is a lot smaller than it appears in the pictures made by Adams and Strand.  They both used large format cameras that allowed them a lot of control over surface textures, depth of focus and perspective.  Their results may seem deceptive today, but it is also possible to argue that emphasizing a kind of monumentality in their portrayals was true to the impression people would have had of the structure when it was built two centuries ago.  My own pictures of the place were made with a relatively simple box camera with few controls, and partly for that reason they reflect a more contemporary and ephemeral view of the site.

I started taking pictures of the church at 6:00 AM when the sun was low and not yet too bright.  That favored the estimated focus, the two apertures, and the shutter that is limited to 1/25 or 1/50 sec. in the Vredeborch Felica box camera.

After I exposed the twelve frames available on the roll of 120 Fuji Acros rollfilm in the Felica I switched to shooting Arista Ultra Edu 100 in my Pentax ME, mostly using the 28mm f2.8 SMC Pentax M.  The final portion of the two hours I spent at the church were given over to shooting Kodak ColorPlus 200 in my Olympus Infinity Stylus.  It will be interesting to compare the results from those two cameras to what came from the Felica box.  Of course, the light later in the morning was very different, and there were some additional characters on the set including several cats and one devout parishioner.

Coincidentally, the day after we got home, the Albuquerque Art Museum offered a morning screening of the PBS biography of Ansel Adams made some years ago, I think.  It was worth watching, mostly because of the brilliant commentary by John Szarkowski.  Photographers watching the film will grit their teeth during the constant zooming and panning of Ansel's images by the cinematographers.

Felica Morning

I have been getting out early to catch some of the nice morning light.  I think my little Felica would rather sleep in.   The Felica has two shutter settings and two aperture selections.  To use the larger f-stop you need to guess the focus accurately.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes not.  The simple  lens at the wider f-stop still provides sharp focus at the selected focal distance, but the three position scale is not much help in achieving the necessary precision.  The Felica is still a fun little shooter, though.  If I get ambitious, maybe I'll try to subdivide that focus scale.

Stretching the Felica

The Vredeborch Felica looks like a box camera, but it has a full compliment of controls.  I decided to give them some exercise by loading the little camera with some Tri-X.  A 400 speed film is a bit of a stretch for a simple camera with a 1/50 top shutter speed, but I thought the use of the built-in yellow filter would get me close enough to the right exposure on a slightly hazy day.  I think that was a correct assumption; the shots I got were within the film's wide latitude.  Still, I think I prefer my previous results with 100 speed film.

Vredeborch Felica

I found this spiffy little Felica recently on ebay.  The camera has some things in common with my all-time favorite box camera, the Ansco Panda.  The Felica is only a little less compact than the tiny Panda, and it also has a 60mm focal length meniscus lens, which produces a wide-angle view compared to most 6x6 format cameras.  Additionally, the Felica has a full focusing lens, shutter speed choices of 1/25, 1/50 and B as well as "cloud" and "sun" settings which are equal to f8 and f16.  A lever on the shutter housing can toggle in a yellow filter behind the lens.  The eye-level finder on the Felica is a little easier to use in bright sun than the waist-level type found on many box cameras including the Panda.  Another nice feature is that the camera can use standard 120 roll film, which makes film loading quite a bit more  convenient than the 620 Kodaks from the same era.  The company made several variations of the design including one which puts sixteen 6x4.5 images on a 120 roll.  As it says on the face plate, the Felica was made in West Germany, probably in about 1957.

Some shots from the first roll: