TOKYO -- Consumer durables like cameras start to show their years, they tend to be left collecting dust as the high-tech market goes on. Does an old camera take what it takes to capture the nostalgic sights of Tokyo? This old soldier of a reporter who grew up in commuting by locomotive, drinking powdered skim milk and eating whale meat took my classic twin-lens reflect camera to the streets to find out.
As the name suggests, a twin-lens reflex camera that granddads surely loved has two lenses. The bottom lens captures the picture and the top one serves as a viewfinder. The image can result in a lopsided picture if you're not used to it, because it's reversed from left to right. Strangely enough, the past came back to me and I remembered it well - though admittedly I can't remember what I had for dinner last night.
The lens of the camera I used is a little cloudy, so shooting into the sun results in flare and the images tend to lack sharpness. There's still that unique flavor to them.
When people age, their bodies no longer move like they used to. But perhaps older readers out there can fish out of their old gear and find out that an accumulation of experience and perhaps a bit of cunning actually count for something, as I found with the images here.
The sales of this camera, the last of Yashica's light and compact twin-lens reflect cameras, began in 1971 and ended in the 1980s. The concept of this camera differed greatly from that of the Mamiya twin-lens reflex camera that allowed lenses to be changed.