A Tale of Two Yashica Electro 35 GTNs

Pretty, and deceiving

A few posts ago, I reviewed my experience with a beater of a Yashica Electro 35 GTN.  Several weeks later, another example of the same model fell into my lap, and it was in pristine condition, shutter speeds and indicator lights were perfect.  I rewound the few frames that I'd shot in my "beater" GSN, and loaded the "new" GSN with the roll of Kentmere 400, and it went along inside my car for some brief photo trips, including my recent visit to Pittsburgh.  

I was shooting with it last week, and realized that sometimes the camera felt as though something wasn’t quite right - and I also saw that sometimes the rewind lever rotated as I advanced the film, and sometimes - most often, it did not.  I rewound the film and developed it the next day.  Much to my disappointment, almost all the frames were overlapped - some just by a sprocket width, some by a half frame, and others, barely overlapped.  Some were up to 3 exposures overlapped.  

As you can see in the video, I checked the advance AFTER the fact, and this is what I should have done in the beginning:

On the plus side, everything was in good focus and properly exposed, but as you can see, it was a bad film advance.  Afterwards, I loaded a many-times exposed test roll that I keep for testing cameras, and with the back open, I could see that the advance would work, and then not.  I could actually hear a difference in the winding when that happened, and it matched what I heard when shooting with it.  Had I tested it that way initially, I would have been spared the disappointment.  So, I will put that lovely example in a box and sell it as a repair camera, and go back and use the beater GTN that works well.  Lesson learned -- and it’s a good thing that I mostly used the Nikon F3HP when I was in Pittsburgh.  Those shots came out great.

see the overlapping frames

So, remember to test a camera with a junk roll to make sure that the mechanical aspects of film winding go as they are supposed to.  In my desire to use that pretty GTN, I forgot to do the one thing that would have saved me from failure later on.

Here's a few photos from the roll - maybe I can call them "art!"