h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Will the GTN live up to the reputation of Rangefinders as the ideal urban image capturing devices? Will I be able to master the unique operating system to get the photos I want? It's now time to hit the streets and throw each other into proverbial balsa wood buildings and get snagged in proverbial scaled down powerlines, and maybe use proverbial miniaturised bullet trains as proverbial nunchakus.

First Things First: Batteries.
My grand initiation to the new-old world of the Yashica Electro. It's an old camera, but not a purely mechanical one. It needs a battery which was pulled out of production because it used an element called Mercury as electrolyte. Modern batteries are available (made of supposedly safer substances), but they are smaller and just rattle around the GTN's capacious battery compartment. Hence the new-old solution of rolling a modern battery in paper and tape to make up for the difference in diameter, and wrapping a piece of cork in foil to make up for the difference in length and complete the circuit. The GTN, therefore, loses points for requiring a hard to find battery, but gains them all back for satisfying my tinkerer urges.

Sucker Punch.
I had been warned about this. One of the first comments I received on Flickr when people found out I had a Yashica went something like, "Uy sarap gamitin yan." They were referring to the feather light shutter release of the Electro. Since the GTN (like all rangefinders and non SLR cameras) doesn't have an angled mirror to spring out of the way every time the shutter release button is pressed, each exposure occurs with minimal Rube Goldberg-ian complication. I didn't think it to be that big a deal; it's not like the mirror slaps and shutter releases of my trusty Nikons are like slamming portcullises (portculli?). But the Yashica really delivers in this department. I'd say it's as loud as striking the flint wheel of a cigarette lighter. However, the discreetness of the shutter release is offset by the rattle and clunk of the film advance lever. It's the mechanical equivalent of shouting, "HOY!" at your subject and then, having caught their attention,
shrugging and whispering, "Wala lang." Again, the Yashica scores a major victory and suffers a major setback in the taking of just one picture. But then the Electro gets a follow up to his all but neutralized sucker punch. "Yashica Electro! Mechanical Vibration Reduction!!!" The combination of the Copal leaf shutter, and the relatively large mass of the GTN means that potentially image blurring vibration caused by a piece of metal flicking open and shut at light capturing speed inside a handheld camera is simply lost. It's possible to get reasonably sharp photos at slower shutter speeds than a typical SLR, no tripods and using the same speed film of course. Whether intentionally or not, the boffins at Yashica came up with Image Stabilisation decades before the ones at Canon and Panasonic.

Just when I thought I had the upper hand, it looks like this camera can still win. Time to back off and regroup.