Serendipity

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My Dad's Balda "Super Baldax" 6x6 roll film camera

    I wrote previously about some medium-format negatives of mine that I'd recently unearthed, which were shot nearly fifty years ago - the Birmingham canal scene in particular. Those rolls of film were taken with my old man's Balda "Super Baldax" folding camera; a beautiful piece of German engineering from the early fifties. It features a *really nice* 80mm f3.5 lens fronting a Prontor-SVS leaf-shutter. It was a joy to use and the images it produced really were cracking.
    After Dad died the camera ended up back with me, but sadly, the shutter no longer works and the focussing mechanism is frankly gummed up with age. I intend to try and rectify these issues at some point - either solo using Google and YouTube as I did with the OM2SP and the Pentax, or after lockdown eases sufficiently, see if there's anyone left at Cambrian Photography in Colwyn Bay (our last 'real' camera shop) that remembers how to repair leaf-shutters. It's a project.
    The curious bit of history that goes with this camera lies in it's earlier years. I guess Dad must have used it for a few years in the fifties, when we were quite little; but as was only too frequent at the time, money problems forced him to let go of the Baldax for cash.
    Fast forward to the late sixties, and the old man was mooching and window-shopping the local pawnshop and spotted the Baldax - he knew straight away it was his old camera because of the strap-loop (top-left in the picture) which he'd made and installed so the camera would hang horizontally on the strap instead of in the old, vertical mode, Kodak Autographic-style. Serendipity. Sometimes things do pan out OK...

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