You may have noticed me alluding to a yet-unnamed camera that was in the shop for like forever. Well, I finally got it back, all nice and serviced. So now here is the big reveal: The camera is a Yashica YF! Never heard of it? I didn’t either until last summer.
Back then, I had just been gifted a Canon Canonet QL17 G-III. This was after losing both the Minolta Hi-Matic 7s and the Olympus 35RD in spring. After toying with the idea of a Pentax ME Super as the “replacement”, then a vain quest for a working Minoltina-S, the Canonet fell in my lap. The quest for a rangefinder was over, and I did not need another.
Well, need and want aren’t the same thing.
Early in August, I was dropping off some rolls at my local lab, The Shutterbug. They have a case that occasionally has interesting cameras, and on this day it was packed. Apparently, the owner got a collector to offload a bunch of stuff. I took a glance and it seemed like the usual suspects, but a rangefinder from Yashica caught my eye. An interchangeable lens rangefinder, something I don’t have. It looked and felt cool. I made note of it and went home. That’s when I did a little search on eBay and saw the price this camera can command. And The Shutterbug wanted less than $100!
Still, I didn’t need another rangefinder, especially since I got the Canonet for free and spent some change getting a clean, lube, adjust (CLA). But now I wanted this machine that up until a week before I did not even know existed. Then I realized that my birthday was just days away. So I asked Emee if she’d get it for me as a present, and we went down and got it. (Thankfully no one else decided to grab it!) Thank you, my love!
I brought the camera out to the coast for my birthday adventure to test out. I got partway through a roll and its advance started to get “crunchy”, eventually it didn’t want to advance anymore. (And once I got the photos back, there was severe frame overlap.) This can partly me bodging the loading, as it’s a very “old-school” remove the bottom vs. swing door. But I also read that there can be issues with the pressure plates on these cameras that can cause this. This issue plus realizing that the slow shutter speeds (under 1/30 second) were working erratically made me decide to bring it in for a CLA before I went any further. I finally got around to dropping it off in September, and it took nearly four months for me to get it back!
*****
“Okay”, you may be saying to yourself, “that’s all some great backstory. But what about the camera itself?”
The Yashica YF is an interchangeable-lens rangefinder from 1959, using the L39 or Leica Thread Mount. It builds the original Barnack Leicas, so pretty similar to a lot of Japanese 35mm cameras from the 1950’s, yet a lot rarer. There are some important differences, and a backstory of its own:
Yashica (formerly Yashima) had established itself as a maker of dependable but affordable medium format (120 roll film) twin-lens reflex (TLR) cameras. These cameras were popular in the ’50s, as larger negatives had advantages over smaller 35mm film. But as the decade waned, the advantages of 35mm, particularly that negative size and amount of frames per roll, overcame some of the difficulties that hindered it through better technology, namely resolution and print quality. Professionals (esp. photojournalists) and enthusiasts were increasingly moving to 35mm format, and TLR sales started to decline. And other than one fixed-lens leaf-shutter rangefinder, Yashica only made TLRs. While rangefinders were the popular 35mm format in the 1950s, it was clear that single-lens reflex (SLRs) were the future, and Yashica needed to stay relevant.1
Nicca was a smaller Japanese company that only made rangefinders. They had some degree of success and were known to be innovative (at least in the realm of “Leica copies”.) But as the decade waned, the market for Leica copies also dried up and they were on the edge of bankruptcy. Yashica bought the company in 1958 mostly as a way to get their hands on their 35mm camera expertise, especially for their knowledge of focal plane shutters, which would be a necessity for a successful SLR.2
Yashica would release their first SLR, the Pentamatic, in 1960. But in the year before they released two interchangeable-lens rangefinders, the YE and YF. There’s not a lot of knowledge on the specifics, just speculation and conjecture, thoroughly rounded up on this thorough webpage. (Go to this page if you want to learn about the YE, a differently stlyed rangefinder with a f/2.8 stock lens.) Most likely they needed to clear out that old Nicca stock or use up old parts, and perhaps Nicca was developing these cameras before the buy-out. In any case, the YE and YF are generally refinements of what came before.3 There’s also the idea that Yashica was aiming for prestige: As a company known only for TLRs and planning to release an SLR soon, having a nice rangefinder before the SLR would look good. The YE and YF were likely stop-gap measures, as they were produced for a year at best. After them, Yashica would only produce fixed-lens rangefinders like their Electro 35 series, which sold a respectable eight million units.
The Yashica YF is kind of a hybrid between the screw-mount lens Barnack Leicas,4 and the bayonet-mount M3 introduced in 1954. Like the Barnack Leicas, the YF uses an L39 lens, a knob rewind lacking a flip-out lever, a manual-reset frame counter,5 and has two-speed dials, one for high speeds (1/30 to 1/1000) and slow (1/30 to 1 sec). But like the M-mount cameras, the YF has a winder advance, combined viewfinder/rangefinder, and a bottom-loading back with a flip-out pressure plate area. It looks more like the M3 than what preceded it. The most interesting thing is while “Yashica YF” is engraved on the top plate, Nicca appears on the front. Only the YE and YF are dual-branded, after this, the Nicca name would fade into obscurity. There’s speculation on why both names are used: perhaps there’s some obscure legal reason,6 or perhaps they wanted to broadcast the quality of the camera by using the respected Nicca brand.
In the past four years, I’ve tried out a lot of different types of 35mm cameras of various styles. All of them came from the 1960s or later, though. This Yashica YF came from the era before that, when things like in-camera meters or informative viewfinders did not exist. It’s definitely a more primitive, more primal photo experience than what I’m used to. You have to check the exterior of the camera frequently to make sure you are using the correct shutter speed and aperture. And I know some folks can meter with their eye (and yes, I know Sunny 16), but I still prefer using some sort of meter. While I’ve used a phone app with my Ricohflex Dia TLR (the photographic experience that comes closest to using the YF), this time I got an accessory shoe mount meter. The Reflx Lab meter is easy-ish to use (once you decipher the manual and get used to the controls), pretty accurate, looks nice, and importantly pretty cheap: I paid less than $50 for mine. Having a meter like this made it easy to use the camera.
To test out the freshly rehabbed Yashica YF, I decided to go somewhere I hadn’t been in a bit: Smith and Bybee Lakes. I usually go here on my bike a few times a year, but on this dreary Thursday afternoon since I was running errands with the car I drove here. The Lakes not only feature natural beauty, but a BNSF spur line is adjacent to the park, and there’s usually some cars parked here. So I also had train graffiti as a subject matter. It was a little awkward at first, getting used to the light meter and the completely manual process, but it didn’t take that long to get used to it. And I didn’t take long to enjoy the experience!
Oh yeah, I got to share this experience with a pack of coyotes. Sound up!
Everything came back good. Okay, there’s the slight issue with the film itself. I decided to use a roll of Lomography Metropolis, and the color is very desaturated (I boosted it a bit in post) and there’s some some imperfections in the emulsion. This is to be expected with Lomography film. It would have been wiser to use Portra 400 for the testing, but ah well.
I’ll be using the Yashica YF quite a bit in the coming months. It’s a lot of fun having an interchangeable lens rangefinder. But of course, since I can use other lenses, I want some, nevermind that I usually shoot at 50mm. The YF has frame lines for 50 and 100mm, and the unframed total viewfinder is 35mm. But while Leica Thread Mount lenses are cheaper than Leica M (or even R) Mount lenses, they still ain’t cheap. The cheapest would be a 100mm, but I doubt I’d ever use it enough to justify the financial outlay. A 35mm would suit me better, but those go for even more. So hit me up if you have a reasonably priced 35mm LTM lens!
For more about the Yashica YF, see these articles:
Photos from the test roll at Smith Lake in the dynamic flickr album below, or click here.
- Yet their commitment to TLRs surprisingly did not wane. They made them up into the 1980s, long after all the other Japanese and German makers stopped, though I believe the Soviets outlasted them in production. ↩︎
- TLRs and many other cameras use leaf shutters, which are embedded into a lens. Focal plane shutters use curtains that go behind the lens, which makes things like interchangeable lenses a lot easier. ↩︎
- I said generally. ↩︎
- There’s apparently some debate on what is a “Barnack” Leica, named after its creator, Oskar Barnack. Some say that anything after his death in 1936 would not count, or when the models got bigger. I’m going with the broader nomenclature of any screw mount Leica before the M-Series. ↩︎
- Which I once have already forgotten to reset. ↩︎
- The above-mentioned page speculates on legal issues with Sears, who had been selling rebranded Niccas as Tower cameras. ↩︎
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