The Leidolf Wetzlar Lordomat SE was my late mother Angela’s main camera in the 1950s and 1960s. We do not know exactly when it was bought, but it must have been sometime in the late 1950s when the camera came out. There had already been two Voigtländer Brillant 6×6 cameras and at least one Agfa Clack in our family at that point and my grandfather had acquired a Voigtländer Vitomatic IIa, but my mother wanted a 35mm camera too and the Lordomat was a relatively inexpensive alternative at that time. It didn’t have a built-in light meter, but an optical rangefinder like the Vitomatic and it came with the rare Lordonar 50mm f/1.9 lens. She used the camera for thousands of photos and they still all look amazing today. I still own the Lordomat SE today and while the shutter has had some problems and at one point I was sure it was broken, after a while it worked again. I haven’t shot any film with it myself, but I might do that soon just for old time’s sake.

Coming from Wetzlar, the city of Leica, the Leidolf company sold a lot of inexpensive cameras from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and the Lordomat series had been a great alternative to other more expensive cameras at that time. There were a lot of different models, some simple ones but also some with rangefinders like the Lordomat SE, others even with built-in light meters. Most of them had detachable lenses and there were a few of them available from Leidolf and a few other manufacturers. The company history was short, in 1962 Leidolf unfortunately ceased production. Today the Leidolf cameras are comparatively rare and I think I can count myself lucky that I own such a wonderful piece of camera history.

The unspectacular location where Mülheim’s Rumbach becomes an underground river.

« Google Maps » | Date: 25.07.2023

One last photo of the snowy squirrel that scampered off pretty quickly.