My shutter tester setup for calibrating the internal resistors for the manual shutter speed mod. That may turn out to be maybe more widely useful to photographers, rather than just owners of Yashica Electro 35 series cameras. I also had to build a crude shutter tester to calibrate the camera, which I wrote a bit about on.

The School of Hard Knocks has gotten much less hard these days, thanks to the fine professors of the School of YouTube.

Cameras, Jeeps, Electronics, Programming. I think half of my technical skills at this point come from youtube and forums. It worked, and I thought that I’d do an internet mitzvah and make a youtube instructional. With a little encouragement, I bought a micro ten position rotary switch, trimmed its leads, soldered and shrink wrapped it up, and jammed it inside my camera. At that time, the camera had wires hanging out of it, no top cover, and was pretty unusable as it was. I tore my camera down and figured out how he did it, made my own, showed it to Denis and some of the people at Quelab, the makerspace (or as I call it, Da Club) here in Albuquerque. I came across a 2010 Flickr post by the user Stefanhh1, about how he added manual shutter speeds to his camera. I did a bunch of googling, trying to find a circuit diagram for the camera so that I might fix it. He told me that he used to use one of them in college and loved it very much.

He picked out an old Yashica Electro 35 GSN whose meter never worked. My friend Denis, who also suffers from camerabedies, the sickness commonly referred to as GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) was over here the other day and couldn’t help but rummage through my camera graveyard. I’ve used that time to do some prototyping on some other cameras that I am working on, some upgrades to the first camera, and some general tinkering… and of course bringing Butter Grip into the world… I have been filling my kickstarter orders for the last month for the CAMERADACTYL 4×5 Field Camera, which has imprisoned me in my own house, a victim of my own mild success, babysitter to a small print farm.

Repair manual yashica electro 35 gx