It’s been awhile since I mentioned photography on this blog, yet it’s an enormously consuming passion. When I have a little time to devote to it, as I have this summer, I spend it trying out “new” (old) cameras, developing my own film, scanning the negatives, and posting them on Flickr - all of which amounts to a lot more effort than blogging.
I recently received a present in the mail, or more like a legacy or inheritance or some such. It was my Grandma Grover’s Yashica-635 TLR (twin lens reflex) camera, which is in amazingly good condition. My grandmother was a good photographer; I remember going to local shows in which her work was presented, and her prints are prized possessions in the family. I took apart the viewfinder assembly to remove some large chaff and clean the mirror to brighten up the viewfinder’s image, but the camera required almost no additional attention.
The viewfinder is the inspiration for the title of the post, by the way. It’s a large ground glass viewfinder, which is unquestionably a glass made for looking; everything is represented upside-down (unless I use the flip-out magnifying lens) and you have to move the camera in the opposite direction of what you perceive visually in order to frame a photo. In addition to using it to make normal photos, you can use it to make TTV, through the viewfinder, photos. Of course, that was one of the first things I tried out, before even loading it with film.
In addition to simply trying it out in my sunroom, I also made what’s known as a “contraption” for more TTV adventures in the future. It’s basically a sleeve that darkens the space between the viewfinder glass and the lens of a second camera, which is used to make a photo by focusing on a subject through the viewfinder of the TLR camera. The contraption is made from boxboard, gaff tape, and matte black spray paint. The boxboard was carefully fitted to the viewfinder for a tight light seal, taped with sturdy gaff tape and reinforced in critical locations, and then spray painted matte black to reduce the chances for light bouncing around inside of it. I haven’t done much testing of the TTV contraption just yet, but hopefully I’ll make a photostroll in the near future and really give it a run.
I did a little research and found that this camera is one of the Yashica Mat series, and it’s the only 120 roll film camera engineered to also take 35mm film. However, to do that requires an adapter kit that I don’t have, but reputation has it that image quality for roll film is a lot better, and I prefer medium format anyway. After developing the first couple of rolls, I find that its calculation of the “start” point for film advance without a red window (which is dandy) is off just a bit for the cheap Arista.EDU film that I use, so I got a couple of images with cropped bottoms where the exposure actually overlapped with the masking tape holding the film to its paper backing.
Aside from the film loading quirk and the fact that I got 11 exposures instead of 12, somehow, I’m pleased with the image quality and expect that I’ll continue to have a lot of fun with this camera in the future.
