I love my Yashica-D. It is a genuine pleasure to shoot.
Which surprises me, because it has no built-in light meter. Using an external meter isn’t hard, but I vastly prefer having one built in so I can assess exposure right in the viewfinder. So much so, that a dozen other meterless cameras with sweet lenses lie about my house in disuse.
But not the Yashica-D. I keep returning to it. I had a weekend afternoon free right after Christmas last year, so I spooled in a roll of Kodak E100G slide film and went out for a drive, stopping to photograph whatever felt good.
My drive led me to South Broad Ripple. My brother works for a software-development consultancy there, and I know one of the partners, so I felt like I could park in their lot and walk around from there. The defunct Monon Fitness Center is next door. The building isn’t much but the faded sign is cool.
Around the corner, Locally Grown Gardens is year-round fruit and vegetable stand in a former gas station. They also have a small menu; you can have lunch there. The property has been in my lens a number of times, as there’s usually something interesting to capture there.
I also made yet another visit to Crown Hill Cemetery. I couldn’t get enough of the joint late last year.
Crown Hill contains a National Cemetery. I find it challenging to shoot because of the tiny gravestones, which I suppose is why I keep shooting it.
It’s too bad that Kodak has discontinued E100G. (Fortunately, I have four more rolls in the fridge.) To my eye, it captures reality. These colors are very much as the day was: nature was muted and undersaturated, which made the man-made colors stand out.
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