Portraits with the Traveling Yashica, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

TravelingYashica is an interesting journey of a compact, point and shoot Yashica T5 film camera that started from UK  in 2013 by Hamish Gill. The concept is simple – you receive the camera, you shoot a roll of film on it and ship it to the next person. You develop your roll of  film and share your experience with the camera and the images you like in your set of exposures from a single roll of film.

I signed up for the TravelingYashica in June 2014 when I saw the theme on my twitter feed. It was a long wait of 18 months till I got my hands on the camera in Jan 2015. The camera spend some idle time at my place till I had the time to finally make it go through the promised 36 exposures and then ship to Romania to continue its journey.

I shot 2 rolls through it, one color (Kodak Ektar 100) and one black & white (Bergger BRF400 Plus) but prefer to use the b&w shots here as I have more involvement with the images in b&w, being able to develop it and scan it at home. The color one was lab developed and scanned while the b&w Bergger BRF400 Plus was developed in my bathroom (darkroom) with Ilfosol-3 (the only film developer I could find in UAE) and scanned on Epson Perfection V550.

The camera is visually not the best looking one if you care about the looks or maybe I like the built, look and control of my Contax T2 more, thought the Yashica T5 lens matches the Contax T2 in terms of optical quality, both being Zeiss optics (Tessar 35 f3.5 T* on the Yashica T5 and Sonnar 38 f2.8 T* on the Contax T2). In practical use there was only one annoying factor for me, the flash always stays in auto mode when you turn the camera ON, and for my style of shooting I would love to have it in FOREVER OFF mode. Other than that it’s been a joy using the little gem, no need to think about your settings, literally point & shoot through the big bright viewfinder. Another drawback could be the current price of the camera on eBay which might push you away from buying one of your own. It’s certainly overpriced, but if you decide to get one for yourself then you definitely won’t be disappointed and will enjoy carrying it around shooting beautiful images.

Wishing more air miles to the camera and hope it goes on strong to cover the whole world (literally). Thanks Hamish for making me a part of the #TravelingYashica journey and giving me the chance to try out the little camera.

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