Used Camera Database Blog

This is the second post in a series of four related to cleaning my used Yashica Mat 124.  The first post in the series describes the task in more detail and includes links to all of the other posts.

My second task once I overcame the first hurdle (cleaning the taking lens) was to clean the mirror box, including the viewing lens and the viewing screen.  I don’t have any pictures from this procedure, but a great resource for viewing what is involved can be found at David Richert’s Yashica 124 rebuild page.  His page has great coverage of removing the viewfinder, replacing the light seal, cleaning the mirror and viewing screens, etc.  So I’ll just add my experiences here, but refer to David’s page for pictures and a great description.

Removing the viewfinder is very, very easy.  There’s two silver flat-head screws each side of the waist level viewfinder which are easy to access and remove.  Just be gentle with them, since they are pretty small screws!  After seeing these screws, I will never pick up the camera by the viewfinder again (not that I was doing that a lot in the first place!).

Once I got the viewfinder off, it was pretty clear that I wasn’t the first person to muck around in there.  Someone had clearly replaced the light seal against the meter (kind of a small light seal, but it did it looked like a good replacement) and the mirror had clearly been cleaned very clumsily resulting in a ton of little scratches in it.  The ground glass and Fresnel lens were in very good condition though, and other than many bits of dirt, everything looked good.

So, the first thing I did was remove the mirror to clean it.  The mirror has a clip on the back that I pulled down to slide the trapezoidal mirror out.  Sadly, it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds, since the mirror is small, space is tight, and I had a lot of trouble keeping the clip down.  But I got it out by wiggling it back and forth a bit and gently pulling until it came out.

Removing the mirror revealed the focus wheel shaft — that was covered in thickened, old grease (a common problem on Yashica Mats).  I tried to clean some of it off, but gave up after it started eating my q-tips! (not eating like acid — eating like a tar pit)   The focus wheel is a little stiff, but well damped and controllable, so I won’t mess with that gooey mess until I need to!

While I had the mirror out, I used a lens blower (rocket blower?) to blow the dust out of the chamber, inspected the meter electronics (all looked good), and cleaned the inside of the viewing lens.  Overall, very easy and painless.

Next, I turned my attention to the ground glass and Fresnel lens.  The ground glass is the part on the top of the viewfinder (closest to your eye).  The top of the ground glass is normal, smooth glass, while the bottom is frosted with the red painted grid.  The plastic Fresnel lens is under the ground glass with the ridged side facing up (toward the ground glass).  Since my camera had some dirt between the two, I decided it would be easiest to just remove them both and clean them that way.

From various articles and forums on the internet, I knew that each of these items (the mirror, ground glass, and Fresnel) are very fragile.  The mirror has the silver part exposed and is very easy to scratch when cleaning.  The ground glass’s red guide lines are quite fragile and easy to scratch or remove when cleaning.  And the Fresnel is just plastic, so it is super easy to mess up the ridges that make it work.  So, my plan was to remove everything, then carefully wash them at the sink.

The key part to removing the Fresnel and ground glass were the clips, shown in this great shot from David Richert.  At first, I got pretty frustrated because I was trying to push the clips down and slid them out — toward the center of the glass.  Once I referred back to David’s page, I realized that I needed to push them down and slide sideways — that worked a lot better!

With the mirror, ground glass, and Fresnel out, I took them to the sink and carefully cleaned them with hand soap, windex at times, and paper towels.  The first step was to rinse off as much grunge as I could, then swish them in soapy water to get more off.  Finally, I used the tip of my finger to lightly scrub the really dirty areas.  After that, I carefully dried them on paper towels, using windex to get stubborn parts streak-free, and that was it.  It took a while (a half-hour for the removal and cleaning) but I did not damage them at all!

So, then, I put everything back together.  The mirror, in particular, is a pain because of the way the clips are organized.  All I can say is, don’t force it!  The clips toward the front of the camera often get in the way and I had to push them down with a separate tool.  The viewfinder went together a little better (remember, the ground glass on top, lines down, while the Fresnel is on the bottom with ridges up!).  On one side my hands got a bit awkward and I ended up scratching the Fresnel a little bit with a screwdriver — I was using two screwdrivers — one to push down, one to slide the clip in.  You can see the scratch if you look closely at the image that starts this page.

Once that was done, I put it all back together, and while I didn’t notice a big difference in viewfinder brightness, I am very happy with it.  The cleaning was pretty easy, overall, although take your time and be gentle!

Next up: Replacing the light seals.

The next four posts will be on the cleaning I finished today on my Yashica Mat 124.  This was not a full CLA (clean-lube-adjust) mostly because I’m not confident I’d be able to get it working again if I got into the precision mechanisms on the camera.  Instead, I focused on fixing the major problems I mentioned in First Shoot Results: Yashicamat 124 Issues: an oil-fogged taking lens and a major light leak.

There are four parts to this series (I’ll link them up as I get them done):

1. Cleaning the taking lens (this post).
2. Cleaning the viewing lens, mirror, and screen.
3. Light seal replacement on the door (to fix the light leak).
4. Fixing the light meter (a.k.a. retrofitting a battery to work).

I am posting this information because I believe it can be helpful to the general public, both for fixing up old Yashica Mats (these techniques will likely work on a 124G also) and just to show that if I can fix up an old camera, you probably can too!

Of course, I need to give the standard disclaimer: attempting this procedure could easily damage your camera and/or lenses.  So know the risks going in, and if in doubt, take it to a professional!

* * * * *

I started by cleaning the taking lens mostly because it was the task I was most afraid of, and if I screwed up the main lens or shutter, there’s no point in putting time into the other stuff.  Cleaning the taking lens requires removing one or more of the lens elements using a spanner tool.  The spanner tool fits into these little notches on the lens:

Of course, I don’t have a spanner tool.  And, they cost $20 or more (and I do not think a regular spanner can reach into the back of a 124, but correct me if I’m wrong!).  The other option was to take the $70 camera into a shop and pay more than the camera is worth, so it was time to figure something out.  I eventually settled on this odd tool:

Yes, this is two blocks of wood, screwed together, with nails through the cube-like chunk.  I drilled holes in the wood to prevent the wood from cracking.  The idea was that the nail points would act like the spanner tips, and I could bend the nails to adjust it.  I hit a snag when I first applied the tool to the front lens element and it popped out of the notches, scratching my finish.  Yikes!

So, I backed off and regrouped, resigning myself to buying an actual spanner tool online.  But, after reading more (including this great thread at photo.net on cleaning the taking lens of a 124G), I realized that most people just jimmied something together to replace the spanner tool, and the lens really isn’t on there that tightly.  I also realized that my nail tips were way too blunt, so I sharpened them with a rotary tool:

Then, placing the ‘tool’ (I loose the term loosely) into the notches, I was able to easily rotate the front element out.  It really does not take much force at all, which was a nice surprise for me.  I’ve heard you can do it with a screwdriver and a small hammer, but try to get a spanner before you try that!

Note the scotch tape over the lens to protect it in case I slipped.  The tape also makes it easy to rotate the lens out without using the tool once it is loosened.  Once removed, the blades of the shutter are revealed (the aperture is wide open and hidden):

Now, some people recommend cleaning the front of the rear element by forcing the shutter open on bulb with a locking shutter release.  Of course, I do not have one of those, and I did not want to run the risk of getting solvent on the shutter mechanism (which often wicks into the internals) so I decided to remove the rear element also.

I read online that it is possible to unscrew the rear element with your fingers (in gloves) so I tried that, but all I accomplished was smudging my lens with whatever lube was on the household gloves I used.  I DO NOT recommend that because it was quite hard to clean off.

Instead, I bent my homemade spanner into shape and got it out easily.  This is the back of the shutter:

And these are the lens elements, front and back:

Note the paper towels that I laid down under my work area to keep everything clean and unscratched.

In my camera, pretty much all the oil residue (that was ruining my images) was on the front of the rear element.  I used rubbing alcohol, q-tips, and lens paper to remove it, but I’d recommend a better solvent if you can get it.  Definitely don’t use rubbing alcohol if it has anything in it besides alcohol and water!  And, avoid getting it in the camera body because the water in it can cause things to rust!

Then, I reassembled the lens elements.  Again, scotch tape came to my aid because it gave me good grip on the front element (screwing it in and finishing with the homemade spanner):

It also helped with the back element:

Allowing me to lower it into place with pliers (I don’t want anything scratched in the light box!):

Sadly, it was too hard to screw it back in with the tape, so I used a pointy tool to push on the notches until it was screwed in, then tightened it (lightly!) with the spanner.

And, the end result?  A perfectly clean lens (well, there are a few specs of dust in it):

I’ll tell you, this fix had me very worried and it took me two weeks to start on it because I did not realize how easy it would be to remove the lens elements.  Don’t hesitate to try this on a cheap camera yourself if you can handle the risk of damage.  Just go slow, be careful, be careful again (one slip of a screwdriver can do damage!), but realize you don’t necessarily need to hire someone to clean your lens!

If you have any questions, let me know.  And next time, I’ll let you know how the viewing lens and screen cleaning went!

Once back to my car parked outside Keeble & Shuchat, I eagerly examined the images from the first roll of film I put through my Yashicamat 124.

And I wasn’t very happy, because this is how my prints turned out (click any photo in this post to see it larger):

So I went back inside to talk to one of the guys at the desk.  Not from a What the hell did you do to my pictures? point of view, but from a What do you think is wrong with my camera? point of view.  The guy I talked to was relatively knowledgeable, but his answer (light leaks) did not totally explain my issues.  Yes, the flare in the lower left corner of many of my frames was likely a light leak. From the research I’ve done, it is common (almost expected) for the foam/string seals on Yashicamats to stop working after 20 or 30 years.  After all, these are what my seals look like:

Not so nice, and I’m planning on replacing them.

The other issue confused me more.  It seemed like contrast was lost in bright areas, almost like a soft focus lens.  While soft focus is not always a bad thing (in fact, I kind of like it on some of the shots of my kids) it is obviously pretty extreme, and I wasn’t satisfied by the K&S guy’s answer to it.  This was not just a light leak.

Well, the problem turned out to be this:

Yes, that is the taking lens of my Yashica mat 124.  And that dot… that’s actually closer to the proper transparency of a lens; the rest of it has a nasty film on it.

But, it turns out that this is a pretty normal problem for Yashicamats (and many old cameras).  Apparently, over time, the lubricant in the shutter evaporates and re-condenses on the optics leaving an oily film that kills contrast.  The solution is to disassemble the taking lens, clean the oil off, and reassemble it, being careful to not break anything.  I’m a bit nervous about this process, because it involves brewing up a spanner tool substitute to remove the lenses:

And yes, the spanner tool needs to get into those notches — believe it or not, I’m planning something involving sharpened nails!

But it does not seem that difficult.  In fact, in the camera repair business, this is termed a CLA, for Clean-Lube-Adjust (although many shops don’t like to use the term “CLA”).  An old used camera boasting a recent CLA is definitely worth something extra.  On the other hand, sometimes a CLA means very little.  In this case, a professional CLA would cost just as much as the camera itself ($70) so I’ll be doing it myself.  Besides, it will be a fun project that will get me that much more attached to the hunk of metal.

Expect details soon — I’m planning to post before, after, and during photos of the procedure(s).

In The Scanning Problem I gave my first, rather unsuccessful, experiments in converting 35mm negatives to a digital format.  After I little more thought, I realized that my failed attempt with my flatbed scanner was for an obvious reason: negatives are transparencies and my scanner only scans reflective items!

After all, think about it — to scan a negative, it has to emit light, pass the light through the negative, bounce off the white cover, go through the negative again, and then get sensed!  No wonder the images were way too dark!

I’ve looked into other scanners and they generally go for $150-$200.  While I plan (hope?) to get one in the future, I promised my wife I’d hold off until it was clear that I was going to have a lot of film to scan.  So, until then, I want a do it yourself solution that fits my budget.

And I think I’ve found a solution…

* * * * *

See, it turns out I already have a very high quality optical scanner at my disposal… my camera!

So, I set up a quick little experiment to see if the result was practical.  Here is the setup shot:

The basic idea is to shoot a flash (Sunpak 383, the trigger is barely visible at right-center), forward through two layers of copy paper to make sure that it is very diffused and even.  The second piece of paper is kept an inch away from the film to keep any texture in it out of focus.  The film is mounted on a black colored piece from the back of a notebook, held by a Costco negative holder that has been sliced to give access.  In hindsight, I sliced way too much off the negative holder, because it was incredibly hard to get the film in there securely and relatively flat.  The holder was taped on, and a clip was used to keep the board upright.

With the flash firing, it looks like this:

I believe I was firing at 1/4 power at 100 ISO, using an old Canon 100mm f/4 Macro lens (FD mount).  Not ideal, with more flare than I’d like, but it did the job.

And the film itself looks like this:

Not too bad, right?  The film has a definite color cast to it, partially because copy paper has a slight blue cast, and I think my camera’s white balance got a bit confused.  Actually, because of the cast from the paper and the lack of precision with this method, I would not recommend trying to do color negatives this way.  Color negatives are notoriously hard to scan correctly, even with a good scanner.

Of course, the true test is how the scan looks.  With a full frame negative capture, here is a 100% crop from the DIY scanned image:

For comparison, here is the scanned image I obtained from Costco:

The Costco image is clearly sharper with nicer contrast (although I bet I could improve the contrast in PaintShopPro pretty easily).  But, the real question is, would it fit my purposes?

Absolutely!

I would estimate the effective resolution is around 2-4 megapixels — plenty for a 4 x 6 print, and way more than needed for web images.  For example (click to see larger):

And, there are a number of improvements that I could do.  Most notably the slide mounting, but also some more consistency in focus and flatness.  So, I’ve got plans to whip up a better version of this nearly free DIY scanner — stay tuned!

I added the new code to the main portion of the site today. Yes, aesthetically it may not be quite as good, but I did not want to wait any longer.

I also put in a reconsideration I also put in a reconsideration request to Google, so hopefully that will get search re-enabled…

I’m backlogged as usual, but luckily I made some notes after trying a Yashica-Mat 124 for the first time about two weeks ago.  Since I think it might be useful to some of you to hear my first impressions when using an old-school TLR, I’ll provide my thoughts here.

Introduction

TLR stands for Twin Lens Reflex.  The twin lens stands for the two lenses involved — the bottom ‘taking’ lens (that actually puts an image on film) and a top ‘viewing’ lens that puts an image on the viewing screen.  The reflex portion of the term stands for the fact that a mirror is used to reflect the image from the taking lens to the viewing screen or focusing glass.  If you’d like to see the mechanical drawings for the camera, check out Assembling charts for the YashicaMat 124G — it can clarify a lot of these terms.  Of course, I have the 124, not the 124G, but the cameras are near identical in construction.

The Yashica-mat 124 is a popular Rolleiflex clone that is reasonably well-respected by used camera enthusiasts yet still relatively inexpensive on the used market (mine was $70, including shipping, although I got a good deal on it).  If you’d like to see current prices, check out my CamNotes page on the Yashicamat 124.

Anyway, I’m coming from a background of digital SLRs, so the 124’s waist level viewfinder and all-mechanical operation was definitely something new.  This first time I ran a single roll of black and white film (twelve 6×6 frames on a roll of 120) through the camera to test it out and check the quality.  The film was Ilford Delta 400 Pro, although I claim to know nothing about film variants at this point.

I’ve already gotten negatives and prints back for this shoot, but that’s another post entirely.  This post is just about first impressions.

Using the Yashica-Mat 124

Holding it in my hands, I constantly felt like I was going to drop the thing, but that is mostly because I do not have a camera strap for it.  Once I got used to it, it felt pretty good in my hands, and the build quality is quite good, much more solid than my Canon 350D (Rebel XT) and even more solid than my 20D.  Of course, pretty much everything on the camera is made out of metal, so that should be no surprise.  For reference, I believe the Yashicamat 124 was sold from 1968-1971, so this camera is almost forty years old.

Whoa, I didn’t think about it before, but the camera is older than I am! (and, sadly, in much better shape)

To use the waist level viewfinder, flip up the viewing hood and look at the viewing screen that it protects.  This screen provides an image equivalent to the film area (a little over two inches square), so it is pretty large.  Brightness is decent, but if you’ve got direct sun on your face or you are aiming into shadow, the viewing screen can be hard to see.  You can also flip up a magnifier (by pushing on the area on the face of a hood) which you put your eye to just like a normal viewfinder, but looking down instead of horizontal.  The magnifier does provide a much larger view and it can be easier to tweak focus, but I had a harder time focusing my eye through the magnifier and composing.  I definitely prefer the normal viewing screen.

And the viewing screen really is one of the neat parts of a TLR.  With a bright scene, it really is like there is a small TV in the camera showing you the view.  And the image itself is just beautiful (even though the mirror and viewing screen on my TLR are pretty dirty).  Strangely enough, the view seems almost 3-D to me — it is hard to describe, but I feel like I’m getting more than just a flat image from a viewfinder.  The one gotcha, at least with the Yashica line, is that the image is reflected left to right.  This is probably a result of the refractive image reversing through the lens and then the reflection correcting the image vertically but not horizontally.  The image reversal definitely interferes with my use of the camera though — I constantly moved the wrong way when composing and the whole process of framing a shot took a lot longer than I’m used to.  I’ve heard that you can get used to the reversed image, but I think it will take me longer than most people.

In practice, I found it was best to frame my shot by eye, then bring the camera up, focus, and shoot.  The prime lens (75mm, approximately a 45mm equivalent for 35mm cameras) is somewhat restrictive, so moving closer/farther from the subject while using the reversed image was quite difficult for me.  The focal length (equivalent to a normal lens) is fine, but the lens suffers from another big problem: the close focus distance is not very close at all.  I constantly found myself running out of focusing room as I tried to get details or a single face.

Flare is also a problem with the camera — many sites mention this — so I’ll likely invest in a hood in the future.

Focusing is achieved with a wheel on the left side of the camera that is very smooth and well-damped.  I had no problem getting good focus.  The shutter release is at the front of the camera under your right finger.  The winder falls on the side of the camera near your right hand.  I found that operating the camera (in terms of winding and cocking the shutter) was very fast and easy.

The “Mat” in Yashica-Mat stands for automatic shutter cocking — after taking a picture, you flip out the winding lever, wind it approximately one revolution clockwise until it stops, then go counterclockwise a quarter of a turn to cock the shutter.  It makes a strange ratchety noise when you wind it that is pretty loud.  I’ve heard that the 124G is much quieter to wind, but the 124 has a more robust winding system.  FYI, earlier Yashica TLRs use a knob for winding and a separate knob or lever for shutter cocking.

The shutter itself is quite a departure from a DSLR shutter.  First of all, there’s no mirror to lift out of the way before firing the shutter — so you can see the image the whole time you release the shutter, and the sound of the shutter is minimal.  Usually just a tiny little ‘click’ that is easy to miss.  For longer shutter speeds, you can hear the mechanical shutter timer ticking down with a noise like one of those wind-up toys they gave kids in the 50s.

Shutter speed and aperture are adjusted with two small knobs between the two lenses (just to the side of them).  There is a readout on the top of the viewing lens that is easy to see when using the waistlevel finder.  I had no problems adjusting the exposure controls.  Of course, I had to do it manually, so I first shot an image or two with my 20D, then set the Yashica Mat to the same settings and shot a frame or two.  This was a very awkward and slow process and I’d really like to get the meter on the Yashica-Mat 124 working at least a little bit.  Oddly enough, the meter actually responded sometimes when I was shooting, and showed an exposure very similar to what I got from my 20D.

The Yashica-Mat 124 meter is a match-needle type, meaning you have an orangish ‘hook’ and a ‘needle’ (actually, just a meter indicator) that you try to get to line up.  The aperture wheel and film speed setting move the ‘hook’ mechanically, while the combination of shutter speed and light sensor move the needle.  The idea is that when you match them up, you have a good exposure.

Of course, the meter in the 124/124g is notoriously unreliable and imprecise, but at least it would be something to keep me from dragging around my 20D every time!

Subjects and Results

My main subjects were my kids, although I took a shot or two of my house to test exposure and different apertures.  The kids, of course, were one of my problems — my kids move a lot!  Furthermore, 400 speed film is great for shadows, but with direct sun you have to stop down significantly to get a shutter speed the camera can actually do.  Luckily, my kids were good sports, because I spent way more time struggling to frame the image and mucking with the settings and focus than I spent taking pictures.  Ultimately, a camera is only as good as the images it lets you take, and this TLR, at least for the first time, got in the way more than it helped me.

With practice, I think I can do better, but ultimately this is not an action camera.  Which is probably why editorial shooters shifted from TLRs to SLRs in the 60s.  But, the larger negative can definitely help out with landscapes or detailed portraits for a much lower price than a large format camera or a 20MP+ digital camera.  I’d like to experiment more with my 124, but ultimately, it will not be a camera I grab when there’s any action involved.

Anyway, I hope this information helps you, especially if you are considering an old TLR like my Yashica-Mat.  If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

And, expect a post in the next few days about the results of this first shoot!