Yashica Electro 35 GSN

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I bought this camera on Ebay, I think, for about $40. It's a great camera, bright viewfinder, wide aperture, and metal construction. You can find these everywhere online, it doesn't take much to find one in great condition. According to Ken Rockwell, Yashica made 8 million of these in its lifetime. So I think finding one shouldn't be too difficult.

Sharp coated lens with a wide aperture.
I had my film developed at the darkroom.com, and they did a great job. Just realize that your images will come out much better if done by them, because I noticed they added extra sharpening in their scans. When I scanned the same negatives, I didn't get the same sharpness. But I could reproduce their results by applying some sharpening. And I had to do a curves adjustment in Photoshop. So regardless, the images did come out very nice, I just tweaked them a little in Photoshop, and they came out similar to the images you see here.

Merchant Square Antiques, in Chandler, Arizona
Interesting knick knacks


Just make sure that if you buy one of these, that the built in light meter is accurate, because it's pretty much an automatic aperture priority camera. Instead of silver cell batteries, you will have to get some alkalines, which is still fairly easy if you search online. You won't be making many decisions other than focus and adjusting how much light the lens lets in. The camera will set the shutter speed based on the F-stop. All in all it's an affordable camera, takes amazing images, looks great, and won't intimidate the public in the street. Go for it.




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