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When my grandparents died last year, my family and I had to clean out their house. I knew they had a very old camera on their chimney but I didn’t know if it still worked. To my big surprise everything worked great, although it all could use a little cleaning.

I started researching the camera on the internet and found that it’s a vredebox made by a German company called vredeborch in Friedeburg. The camera uses 120 film, has a meniscus lens with an aperture of f11. Fastest shutterspeed is 1/30th of a second. There are 3 levers on the side, one for stopping down the lens to f16 and the other 2 to use the bulb setting.

Those settings are a bit of a let down, but I wanted to test it out anyway. So after Pieter gave me a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 pro, I started shooting with the vredebox.

Oh yeah, just so you know, the minimum focus distance on this camera is 3 meters.

Let me first post some results and then I’ll give a little review about the camera.

This picture was taken on Ilford Delta 400 pro film.

Taken on Ilford Delta 3200

Taken on Ilford Delta 100 film

If you want to follow my progress with the vredebox, I suggest you follow this set on flickr, I’ll post the results there when available.

Now for a short review of the camera. Although it’s technically not very good, I really like the box feeling and the way of taking pictures. Because of the lack of features or wide range of aperture and shutterspeed, I think a lot more before I make I picture. This makes that I’m more concentrating on the framing of the shot, which is not easy in the small viewfinder located at your stomach.

Until now I’m very pleased with the results of the box, a camera that’s at least 60 year old. It’s a decent and fun camera for hobby projects, so I’ll be playing with it a lot more in the future