Yashica Electro 35 GSN

So I have done it again. Although I've tried hard to avoid putting myself into buying another gear, I still ended up with this, Yashica Electro GSN35, "poor man's Leica". For the record, I didn't buy it because I saw how cool it looks with Andrew Garfield.


Yes :) A little trivia here, the camera that Tobey Maguire was using in Spider-Man (2002) was Canon F-1 SLR, 1981 model, while Andrew Garfield was using Yashica Electro GSN35 in the last Spider-Man (2012) movie. I asked my wife whether she can take a photo of me using this camera like the above and she said it's not possible ...

The camera felt much heavier than I expected at first. It has a robust and rugged feeling to it which I ended up liking although I'm not a fan of carrying a heavy camera, it's just something you have to live with. It only operates in AV mode with the exposure level indicated by the two arrows displayed in the viewfinder. Turn the aperture ring to the shown direction and you have a photo ready. I've got no problem with something so straightforward and easy to use, but if you want a more manual operation than this, maybe it is not for you.

After shooting a couple of rolls, I can absolutely assure you that camera's metering is damn impressive. I had already read its precise metering capability in the various reviews before, but confirming that by shooting the subject with strong shadow in the bright daylight was pure pleasant.


There are still many of these cameras are avaliable and I've got myself one from eBay, a sell from Hungary, who had the full kit including two types of conversion lenses which I don't think I will use much as I'm more than satisfied with its 45mm f/1.7 fixed lens. All together it costed less than A$200,  who on earth said a full frame camera is expensive?

So, here we go. Let the fun of photography continue.


Thanks for visiting.