The Forgotten Yashica Diary

A few weeks back my friend and I were discussing photography, and since he knows that I’m an analog geek on all fronts, he mentioned that his grandma had left him a pair of old analog cameras. I got excited right away and wondered if I could see them, but my friend was already one step ahead.

A few weeks back my friend and I were discussing photography, and since he knows that I’m an analog geek on all fronts, he mentioned that his grandma had left him a pair of old analog cameras. I got excited right away and wondered if I could see them, but my friend was already one step ahead.

He had been thinking more and more about ditchin’ the digital world of zeros and ones and join the vividly coloured analog side of photography since I first mentioned Lomography a while back. So, with no experience, or film, or money, he thought that I could go for a test-run with the two cameras, just to make sure that everything was working properly etc etc.

He showed me the two cameras, an Agfa Click-1(not the clack) and the Yashica Diary. I was really excited about both, but particulary the Diary which somewhat seemed to grab more of my attention with its flashy pop-up flash and that kind of 80’s japanese-heavyweight-camera-quality.
The Diary is a 35mm viewfinder camera made by Yashica in the late 70’s and most of the 80’s, and it’s practically a Yashica MF that can print dates on your pics(unfortunately the date stops at 1999).
It has auto-exposure, so you just pop your film in, pop in a battery or two, set the ASA and then head out! This is nothing new for LCA-people but I think that auto-exposure is so awesome because all my other cameras are fully manual.

So, me and a friend decided to test the camera out and went to a abandoned factory just outside Gothenburg, Sweden. I loaded the camera with some Fuji T-64 and shot away. It was pretty cloudy outside on most of the pictures, but ISO 64 seemed to work pretty fine anyway. And instead of tricking the auto-exp. by changing the ASA, you can just take the batteries out and pop up the flash. Also worth a mention is that the pictures are ghetto-scanned, so they may look a little more beat-up and lo-fi than they actually are. Just a little bit.

The quality of the pictures is really nice. The 38mm Yashica lens gives you really wonderful colors, it has nice contrast and somewhat seems never to be out of focus, even though the focus is manual!

written by cowboy on 2010-12-15 #gear #yashica #review #user-review #yashica-diary-35mm-light-meter-japan-compact-camera-fuji-t64-x-pro-tungsten