The Traveling Yashica: Ben Jennings, Reading, England

So when the Yashica T5 finally arrived on my desk at work I was a little bit nervous to say the least, firstly because I had seen the previous entries for the traveling Yashica, blimey, the bar had really been set quite high, very impressive guys. My second reason for nervousness was the fact that I had to hand over full control of exposure to the camera, I could choose flash, having the date imprinted and the rest was down to content and composition. Very scary.

The T5 auto focus system is ace, it nails it 90% of the time and now that I have the films back from dev, I would say that I should have trusted it a lot more. When using the camera I was constantly worrying what focus had actually been achieved but it more than delivered, even in low light at the Christmas Fair in Worcester with Hamish himself it performed super snappy, the only time it missed a shot was usually down to me not concentrating on what I was doing.

There was one thing that did annoy me though, partly down to my own ignorance, was the date imprint, I had assumed that even though the date was displayed on the back of the camera, didn’t mean that it was on the photographs, I was wrong, as Hamish pointed out to me when I met up with him to give him the camera, bit gutted that I didn’t realise that half a film ago but hey, I’m to blame for that one.

The lens on this camera really does perform well, having shot a roll and a half (a perk of knowing the owner) in it both colour and black and white I was really impressed with the contrast of the images, very pleasing to the eye and even the flash does well, not much over exposure which is often seen. The lens does seem to have a certain look to it, basically a very good overall performer.

It was also a nice break to just point ’n’ shoot for a while, really not get bogged down in settings for the image and just shoot. Haven’t felt like that since I was last shooting on my Olympus Trip. The Yashica is an ugly camera to be honest, it’s big, it’s black and it plastic, it really doesn’t look like the price it commands. It has a couple of nice features like the super scope (used a few times) and the very ergonomic power switch which I found very pleasing.

I did really enjoy using this camera and am keeping a keen eye out for one, even though it feels cheap and fat, its results far exceed what should be expected. Truly a great camera and worth trying for sure.

Thanks for reading.

Ben. (Find me on Flickr, Twitter)

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