I picked up this little camera from a recent Car Boot Sale for a few pounds without giving it too much thought.

It is an Ideal Color 35 made in Germany by Camera-Werk Adolf Gerlach of Barmen, Wuppertal. Production started in 1954 and at some point the company name changed to Camera-Werk Nixon, which is when this one was made going by the Nixon on the lens.

It is a simple viewfinder camera with a few little quirks like the bottom film loading, and the shutter release pops up when the shutter is cocked to prevernt double exposures. It feels well made despite it’s initial appearance.

I have been wanting to go to Wuppertal for several years to photograph and ride the Schwebebahn Suspension Railway that winds through the city, and this camera has come to me at the right time with the trip planned for next month. It would be great to take it and shoot a roll in Barmen where it was born.

Firstly though it needed a test roll run through to make sure it was working properly. For this I used an expired roll of Kodak 200.

I headed to the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare on a warm summer day for the test.

First impressions are mixed - yes the camera does work, but the lens is rather questionable! Shot at maximum settings of 1/100th and f16 due to the bright conditions and the fall off of the lens is spectacular! The centre is not sharp by any means but this falls off rapidly on the rest of the frame.

To be fair some of the images are just about acceptable, and definitely have a certain character to them - obviously I wasn’t expecting too much anyway so to get half descent images is a good thing. The film actually performed well for expired Kodak - going by the six-digit code on the cannister it was made from 2006 onwards, so not majorly old, but still better than other rolls I have shot from this age.

This frame does have a bit of an overlap, but I have not got the negatives back yet to see if this is the only time it happened, and there was a black line across the top of every frame - so that needs looking into. I would like to shoot black & white in Barmen, and going by the quality of images this lens produces I have to be mindful when choosing a film. I think Ilford FP4 may be a good idea due to the very limited top speed of 1/100th and it is quite a clean film in terms of grain so would hopefully minimise loss of quality.

The town does have some good street art, so had to include a couple of shots!

These images would be very disappointing from a higher spec camera, but it is not high spec, so it is what it is.

This was a good exercise to see how the camera performs so I know what to expect next time, and also what compositions might work best.

Ideal Color 35 test roll…

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