Yashica Electro 35

[Infinite]

Yashica Electro 35 GTN by Infiniteey, on Flickr
Yashica Electro 35 GTN by Infiniteey, on Flickr
Yashica Electro 35 GTN by Infiniteey, on Flickr

Found this bad boy in my attic last night. Seems to be in fairly good condition although the foam seal has degraded into a sticky mess :/

Quick google tells me it a solid old school rangefinder camera. Uses banned mercury battery so looks like I'll need to get an adapter of some sort.

I'm one from the digital camera generation as I have never used film before but I am quite interested in find out how this works.

Anyone used one of these before or something like this? Hints, tips, type of film?
Also does anyone know any good tutorials in how to use film camera? Would be quite helpful, particularly on how to load film into it XD

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Silver Oxide batteries should work too although they have different discharge characteristics so might need to be replaced more often,otherwise the meter might give weird readings.

Regarding films,if you are scanning slide is better,print is better if you are going to get pictures done at a lab. However,make sure you go to a good lab as it is one of the most important factors in getting a decent print.

What film you use is dependent on the conditions and type of photography you want to do.

[TheAnimus]

35mm film is going to be a faff. Your going to have fun with the metering (as cat mentions the substitute batteries will be subtly different), it's surprisingly expensive in terms of film and prints too.

So really do it properly! See if there isn't a local club to you (try meetup.com or even ask the local library) that will let you learn how to develop the film yourself. It will be a lot more fun, hopefully someone will teach you, and you can have that wet control. Developing your own photos is the old-school way of shooting RAW, were as posting off to a lab is like shooting JPEG.

[g8ina]

Just remember it's 50p every time you press the shutter

[Infinite]

Thanks for the advice guys.

After a bit of searching it seems like "playing" around with this camera at this moment in time seems a bit more trouble than its worth especially once costs are factored in. I actually though it would have been relatively cheap to get a film camera up and running.

Shame as I would have liked to explore old film photography.

Doesn't seem like the camera is worth much either so looks like it going back into a cupboard and maybe in a few years when I have a bit more time and money to play with it.

P.S. looking at how to load film and operate a camera really shows how far photography has come in these past decades XD