Voigtlander Vito C

This is the first in a new series of 'Advance/Rewind' called 'The Camera Cupboard' where we'll feature cameras from the Kosmo Foto collection and our online shop Cameraburo.

These posts are for paying subscribers of the blog – you can upgrade your membership here.

 It was meant to be a gift.

Anthony Rue used to run a café called Volta in Gainesville, Florida. He got in contact soon after I released my first film, Kosmo Foto Mono, hoping to stock it in the café as Gainesville's last camera shop had recently closed down. Cue many long chats over Facebook, learning that aside from film photography we were both equally nerdy over indie music, the space race and Eastern Europe.

At same point, Anthony told me of one of the cameras that had got away. It had been lost when his bag was pinched out of an open window while his taxi was stuck a traffic light in Colombia; inside the bag was a camera he'd picked up on his European travels some years earlier: a Voigtlander Vito C.

This was a camera I'd heard about, but not yet seen in the flesh (but more on that later). It's a pocket-sized viewfinder camera built by the same designer who had created the much-loved Minox 35 family. Anthony raved about its fantastic lens and exposure system, and his difficulty in finding a replacement in the US.

A few weeks later, I was in Brighton, and found myself eyeing the window display of the town's old-school camera shop Clock Tower Cameras. And there? you guessed it, a Voigtlander Vito C, at a price reasonable enough for me to grab it as a surprise present.