Last weekend I took my Zeiss Ikon Balilla out for its first shoot. I picked this camera up at a flea market when I was in Rome, Italy. I really haggled with the non-English-speaking vendor. I finally beat him down to 30 Euros. I kind of felt bad when I got home and found out that the camera regularly goes for over 400 bucks on e-bay -and is pretty rare. Zeiss is a German company but the camera was made for the Italian market only, starting in 1936. Balilla was the name of Mussolini's fascist youth group. I thought the camera took full 6x9 images on the 120mm film(I used Ilford Delta 100) but it actually takes smaller images. With box cameras you have to wind the film until a number is visible in a red window on the back of the camera - the numbers and windows line up in different spots depending on the size negative the camera takes. When I developed this roll I had an image "every other space". The film this camera originally took must have had a different numbering system. I ended up with only half the shots I should have - this has never happened to me before and I'll need to look up how to line up modern film correctly in this camera.
'Bike' - must have shaken the camera a bit during exposure.
West Side Market
Back of the West Side Market
Mayflower Manor
This is an accidental double exposure - which is really easy to do with these old cameras. The film winding lever is completely independent of the shutter so if you forget to advance the film you are left with multiple exposures on one frame....
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