So this is today and tomorrow:
I've had the good fortune to work with some great seniors who are graduating this weekend. Good luck, thanks, and break a leg! pic.twitter.com/lY0X2t0BAm
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) May 5, 2017
This evening I, finally, started cleaning up my home office. It has just been sitting there, as offices do. The problem has been the amount of stuff that has been sitting inside of it. It should be a useable space, which is why the straightening up is taking place.
Really, of course, this just means moving things from here, to there. So the adjoining closet, which was full but not obnoxious, is now trending that way again. But a few things will be moved out of that room and to … somewhere else besides.
I’ve found, as a lifelong expert in organizing things from messy piles to slightly less offensive stacks, that doing one corner at a time is a great way to spend your efforts. When you get two corners cleared you are ready to make some progress on the wall in between. And if your room is laid out in a seemingly static style, then there isn’t much to do along that wall. Because there are bookshelves and furniture and whatnot.
On top of one of the bookshelves is this camera, which The Yankee picked up for me last year.
Isn’t that lovely? This is a Yashica twin lens reflex camera, a Mat-124 G.
Now, this is a bookshelf camera, but all of the buttons and knobs and cranks work, as you’d expect on an entirely mechanical camera. It stands to reason, then, that if I got some 6×6 film and cleaned the glass it would still take decent medium prints. Except for that front piece, on the top, it is in terrific condition.
And those quick cellphone photos remind me I need to build a new lightbox. Perhaps another weekend project!
Anyway, Yashica first started making the ancestor of this camera in 1957. It was a 75 mm variety. This one is 80. And here’s the view through the viewfinder, which you look down into from above:
This camera would shoot at 1/500th of a second, and the aperture dial allows for f3.5 to f32. This might be one of the first times I’ve looked through the viewfinder and … the focal ring works! So does the sports finder, which is basically a magnifier:
Now, the Yashica Mat 124-G was made between 1970 and 1986, so it isn’t old as these things go. But it has probably sat on a shelf or in a closet for all of the time since. I know it has at least since last spring, when it was given to me. And I’m standing in my office, pointing it through a window, through the window screen and then taking a photo of what I see in the viewfinder through my phone. So the representation isn’t bad, but the glass inside this thing is good for an entry-level medium format camera. And the image capture, at some settings, is terrific. Through the sports finder once more:
