The Break of Dawn

The Continuing Passion–

We started talking about the Yashica J3 last week, the little known product that it is. To recap, there is hardly anything automated with it and it really does show you what the “reflex” in “Single Lens Reflex” really means. It’s amazing to see that it actually does operate without batteries and that though everything seems very archaic and low-tech by today’s standards, it is still good to be right next to the more basic technology of photography – the camera body is able to push on a button on the lens so that the aperture closes on the lens at approximately the exact time when your finger pushes down on the shutter button.

Erick Lirios

With the J3, shooting was also a two-step process and you really had to manually do other things aside from setting the aperture. To focus, you need things bright in the viewfinder and to achieve that, your aperture has to be set to its biggest hole setting (i.e., f/1.4, f/2.8, etc.). To do that with this Yashinon lens, you move this little level on the side of the lens down. If you don’t do that, whatever aperture is set on the lens’ aperture ring is already stopped-down. So if you’re at f/16 and you’re just about to focus, things inside are really very dark. Though this gives you a preview of depth of field, it’s still difficult to focus. So you open up and once you depress the shutter button, a big tongue-like thing inside the camera presses on a small button on the lens to close it down to the aperture selected. After that, you do the whole thing again.

You can imagine wondering if things are still working because of the suddenly dark image you get right after a shot. You may end up thinking, “Did I do something wrong?” or “Did I break it?”

There are other very, err, manual things about this camera. For one thing, it doesn’t even have a hot shoe. Users of cameras like the Nikon F up to the F3 and the Canon F1 models have an idea of what this is like. There were accessories you had to buy (chalk one up for the marketing people) to allow the use of a flash. This wasn’t much of an issue back then because many people abhorred using artificial light. With the J3, you pop in a flash unit on the shoe and have to make sure this was a flash with a synch cable on it. A flash without one simply will not do. Otherwise, you have to get yourself an adapter which has the cable. Then you plug in the end of the cable to (okay, which is which?) the X socket and not the FP socket. Some of the older cameras have these two. The FP isn’t really used anymore since these are for use with flash bulbs that peak in light intensity at a different time than your regular flash. If you plug in here, sure, the flash will pop but you may just get dark areas on your photos. Trust me, I tried it. Heck, I even tried to see if a non-cable flash would pop on this shoe. I was 12 years old and no one could teach me stuff at that time. I had to figure everything out myself.

Oh, and the flash eventually used on this wasn’t all that automated either. It only popped at full power – no TTL, no auto aperture. You had to determine how far you were to the subject, and for a 12-year old, that meant focusing first and then looking at the lens to determine that distance. After that was done, you looked at a table printed on the side of the flash (a model I later used with a Canon AE1 had this table at the back) which told you what aperture to use given your distance and ISO. How’s that for manual? This is really the same thing you do with studio lights but with the aid of a light meter and ample time. Thinking on your feet is something you really learn here. People who are used to TTL flash units or even those with the A mode (you set an aperture value on the camera and the flash) are in for an experience.

Something that many people take for granted even in their manual focus SLRs is the split-image microprism. This is actually technology that helps a lot in focusing. Those who’ve used it know that there’s this circle in the middle of your viewfinder screen and that circle is cut in the middle. An image seems to be cut in two when your not focused and everything seems normal when you do achieve focus. The J3 doesn’t even have that. All you have is the microprism which gets clearer when you’re in focus. A good exercise here that will serve you in good stead is to practice focusing by hand. Focus on something and then quickly move the camera to something else and then focus on that. You really need to have a good sense of whether turning the focusing ring to the right will allow you to focus on something closer or whether turning to the left will do that.

At the end of it, what benefit does messing around with a camera like this have? It brings you to the nitty-gritty of photography without getting too caught up in things like megapixels. As we’ve said here numerous times before, a really good photographer with a not- so-good camera will result in much better photos than a lousy photography-pretender with a really, really good camera and lens.

We did say the camera isn’t working anymore and one of the photos here shows you why. Is there any hope for this? A compromise maybe is to get a reverse ring adapter allowing a lens to be mounted in the reverse position, i.e., the front element of the lens, with all the information like its brand, aperture, etc., face the camera and its rear element, the part usually inside the camera, closest to the mirror, is on the outside. If nobody can fix this camera, then I guess that’s the only way to get more use out of it.