I picked up this camera along with 3 others from a Freecycle group a few weeks ago. In the box there was an old Kodak Disc Camera, a plastic 35mm point and shoot and a yet to be tried Polaroid Colorpack 3 (with a film!!!). The Yashica is a 35mm fixed lens rangefinder camera dating from 1963 and considering it’s age it is in remarkably good condition! The camera has a built in CDS metering system which takes a 625 battery which, as luck would have it, I had lying around as I’d bought 2 for a Super 8 camera which then turned out not to work!
I found the camera a little difficult to get used to – you read off the exposure meter in Light Values LV and then set the value on the lens which sets the correct aperture and shutter speed for that Light Value. You can then move the rings round together if you want a greater depth of field or a different shutter speed. On the first time out with it I found the needle on the light meeter wobbled about a bit and checking against the light meter on my phone found it may have been reading a little high but this didn’t seem to effect the final images so maybe it was ok.
I took the camera down to Brighton on 1st April on what was a bright sunny day (although quite chilly on the seafront and used about two thirds of the Kodak Gold 200 asa film that I’d put into it up. The film had expired about 10 years ago but this seems to have had little effect on the outcome. The rest of the film was used up on a visit to New Romney on the 18th May. It was while I was finishing the film off I started to notice a delay between pressing the button and the shutter firing which I thought was a little odd. A few weeks after the film was removed I went back to have a look at it and to my horror discovered that the shutter wasn’t firing at all. I did a quick google and the info I found suggested that the shutter may need lubricating which turned out to be quite a simple job. The lens element simply unscrews and you can then get at the shutter blades. A cotton bud and some lubricant and it was fine again. I’ll have to try another film in it now but in the meantime here are some of the results from that first film….
The Shed on the Web 