Hey everyone. Does anyone have any experience using the Yashica MAT TLR? I bought one off eBay and it should be arriving on Saturday or Monday. I want to test it out to make sure it works before I leave feedback for the seller. The problem is I'm not really sure how to use it. I tried looking for snippets of the manual, with no luck, let alone a completed manual. Can anyone help me out? I'm looking for an outline on general camera usage, such adjusting shutter times, adjusting aperture, cocking shutter (is it possible to de-cock the shutter?), things that I should avoid doing unless I want to break the camera, order of things to do when shooting, etc. Camera specs: Yashica MAT 80mm f3.5 Lumaxar 120 film
You may not be able to cock the shutter n fire it unless you have film in it. I leave an empty spool in it on the side with the "film in" sensor... that's the long silver rod inside the film chamber. Another very important thing to remeber is DO NOT use the self timer unless the flash sync is set in X flash mode or you will lock it up. DON'T FORCE IT, that will break the shutter, a very common reason many of these cameras are broken. It has to be taken appart to unlock it and that is the only way to do it properly. Many people put a screw in at the sync lever or lock in in place with tape. Otherwise the camera is a beatiful TLR you can enjoy for a long time. I have several of em n love em all. Your lens is one of the nicer ones. As long as it's not fungus eatten, it will take great pics which we hope you'll post once you get familiar with the camera.
They take absolutely wonderful photos if you take your time. It's much more difficult to get film for them now. I bought one for my wife in the 1960s because she had trouble holding a viewfinder to her eye.
If you go here you can find the camera manual. You probably won't find the exact model as yours is a very early Yashica. Snowalker it's normal to buy a camear before you know how to use it, otherwise how do youget started Ian
Yes, I did, flamebait. Do you have a problem with that? I am, unfortunately, unable to use things flawlessly directly out of the box. I don't have the data files of how to use things implanted directly into my head via a neural uplink like Neo, Morpheus and Trinity. I'm familiar with butkus, that's how I found out the camera I wanted was a Yashica MAT not a YashicaMAT LM. Camera arrived earlier today. It's a sweet camera. The "leather" is peeling at the edges a bit though. It's great except there appears to be a moderate amount of dust between the elements of the taking lens. That and the shutter speeds 1,2,5,10 are slow. Very slow. The 1/10 stays open for 2-4 seconds, while the 1 second stays open for up to 30. First I'm going to shoot three rolls to see if the dust has a significant impact on the picture quality. Even if it doesn't, I'll probably get it CLA'd anyway. I bounced an e-mail over to Mark Hama for a quote.
I'm not suggesting you do the CLA yourself but if you do happen to take it apart here is a copy of the assembling chart... http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~coreya/yashica/index.html
It will take you a little bit of time to get used to looking through the view finder because everything is upside down but it is sick.
It seems like everytime I use mine someone comes up and thinks it's the newest hi-tech thingie because of "that giant LCD screen on top" ... LWW
