Okay, so I’ve got this old Yashica Lynx 5000 rangefinder camera. It’s a beautiful piece of machinery, but sometimes the automatic focus just doesn’t cut it. I wanted to really get a feel for manual focusing, so I dove in headfirst.
First, I grabbed the camera and took a good look at the lens. There’s that focusing ring, right there, with all the distance markings. It felt a bit stiff at first, probably from years of sitting around, but I worked it back and forth a bit to loosen it up.
Getting Started with Manual Focus
- I found the little window on top of the camera – that’s the rangefinder. When you look through it, you see a double image.
- The trick is to turn the focusing ring until those two images line up perfectly. That’s when your subject is in focus.
So, I picked a subject – my cat, naturally, who was lounging in a sunbeam. I looked through the rangefinder and saw the double image of him. It was pretty blurry.
Then, I started turning the focusing ring slowly. As I turned it, I watched the two images of my cat in the rangefinder window. They started to move closer together.
I kept turning, making tiny adjustments, until the two images became one. It was like magic! Suddenly, my cat was sharp and clear in the viewfinder.
Practicing and Getting the Feel
- I practiced this a bunch of times, with different subjects at different distances. My cat, a book on the shelf, a tree outside the window…
- It took some getting used to, figuring out how much to turn the ring to get the focus just right. It’s all about feel.
At first, I was a little slow, fiddling with the ring and losing the shot a few times. My cat got impatient and walked away at one point, haha!
But the more I practiced, the faster I got. I started to get a sense of how much to turn the ring based on how far away the subject was.
It’s really satisfying to nail the focus manually. It makes you feel more connected to the camera and the picture-taking process. Plus, you get that super sharp focus that the auto-focus sometimes misses.
So yeah, that’s how I learned to manually focus my Yashica Lynx 5000. It was a bit of trial and error, but totally worth it!
