Well… another one to the collection. Well soon I will have no space to store those cameras. However that one came quite a long road to my hands. Well it was hunted down on American eBay for a great price. On the polish market – polish the most popular auction webpage currently there are only three broken specimens in different versions of that camera, and the price bought on ebay costed half of the price of the working specimen of Electro 35, even including the postage. What’s more funny half of the bidded price was the cost of postage to Poland… Of course I had to read a little about sending parcels to the UE and customs, taxes and risk involved if not payed, however reassured that low value of the camera and fact it’s a used model (for a long time in fact :) ) I was confident and I was waiting for the postman.
That camera is quite interesting one: good optics f/1.7, half-automatic mode, compact size, range finder… probably that’s why it was so popular.
You can read a little bit about it on wiki pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yashica_Electro_35.
Some other interesting facts with that camera includes fact that it has only Auto or aperture-priority-like-mode… and whether there is enough of light is displayed by two arrows: red right arrow means that photo is overexposed and yellow left – underexposed. Great idea of the constructors was that arrows can be also visible in the viewfinder :) Another interesting aspect is electronically controlled shutter, and this allows the shutter speed to be completely step-less and to adapt to changing light levels… we’ll see what will be the effect on the photos :) Unfortunately there will be no exif to check the shutter speed :)
First model 35 was introduced in 1966 however mine model 35 GSN with some improvements was introduced in 1973. So even if it’s not the first camera from the series… this camera is a few years older than me.
Because of the age mine is not perfect although visually is in superb conditions, it has to have it’s light seals fixed. The old rubber just fell off. I’ve already almost collected all items to exchange the rubbers… I hope to do it right and quickly to test the (new) camera quite quickly.
So for now my collection of cameras includes: Analogue: Yashica Mat (middle-format), Canon AE-1 Program (35mm film), FED4 (35mm film), Yashica Electro 35 GSN (35mm film) and Digital: Canon 350D, Canon 50D. In other remote location I also have old polish DRUH (6×6 cm, 4.5×6 cm film), and russian CMEHA – SMENA SYMBOL (35mm film)… So it’s a start for a nice collection…
Okay time to show You mine new Toy :)
Yashica Electro 35 GSN
Yashica Electro 35 GSN
Yashica Electro 35 GSN