I have been struggling with some weird behaviour of the new view camera and while equipment is usually the last thing to blame in your photography, this time it turns out I have done everything right (well, who knows) and, to put it bluntly, there was a bloody hole in the camera! I bought it from a friendly gentleman on eBay in the UK and according to him, the camera was serviced in London by an outfit called Teamwork. Excuse my directness, but they did an absolutely crap job. Obvious internal parts were missing before and now this. This reminds me of the London days, where once a bunch of incompetents called Albion Computers (an authorised Apple Service Provider) repaired my iMac to death, removing my hard disk, memory and other parts in the process, and refusing to put things back together (full story here: How Albinos shrank my iMac – this letter is one of many I had to write in the UK). Moral of the story: stay away from those people and appreciate Japanese service while you can.
Tag Archives: eBay
One for the road
 |
We are going on a backpacker-ish trip to Thailand next week and the question apart from where to go and stay is what camera to take. Pickpockets are an issue, as well as other things, and the last thing you want to do on your holiday is worrying about stuff like cameras. So I did an impulse purchase on Yahoo! auctions for this nice Yashica Electro GX (I made the picture a little more colourful to emphasise the happiness of the seventies, when this camera was produced. Don’t think I am just another superficial foreign photographer in Japan). Turns out it is a rather rare camera, according to one source not even listed in the “Japanese Camera Collectable” guide books. But that was a coincidence, because if it is valuable, then I am back to my original problem, aren’t I?
Anyway, I realised that the camera is not in such great shape after all. With the rather humid Japanese climate, the lens of this camera fell victim to the dreaded kabi (fungus) on the front and second lens element [pics]. I will try to take off the front element according to some repair instructions and clean the second element. Although if that turns out not to be possible, then that’s fine too. At the moment the camera is sunbathing on the balcony to let the sun’s UV rays kill the nasty spores.
I have been meaning to mention how great using Yahoo! auctions is. It must be one of those aspects of Japanese culture where one can feel safe and trust the people, but maybe that is just my illusion and wishful thinking. Anyway, I have made 3 transactions in the last 2 months and with a little Japanese language skills you can go a long way in buying and selling some nice things. The best part is the delivery. We have all seen the Kuroneko vans cruising the streets, but the home delivery network in this country is just a marvel. You can drop off your package in any convenience store and it arrives the next day for a not too high a charge, and most of the time it is best to send it chakubarai, where the receiver pays for the postage. No excessive quoting and calculating payments. It is a pure joy. This comes at the same time as my first bad eBay experience.