Gear nostalgia part 2 - Yashica TL Electro

(Continued from part one) The Yashica came with a 50 F 2.0 lens. It featured stop down metering through the lens. Two green light diodes in the shape of arrows should both light up when the exposure was right. The metering was averaged over the whole image and the mount was again the M42.
I also wanted to try a really long tele (doesnt everyone when they are new to SLRs/DSLRs?). I bought a 400 F6.3 Soligor with pre-set aperture. Soligor and Vivitar where the big brands in third-party lenses at the time. The lens had a T2-mount - an adapter system so the lens could be used with different mounts. However, it did definitly not add stability to the mount. To this day I am suspicious about lens adapters that makes lenses to fit different brands.
I switched my color shooting from prints to slides, getting an enormous quality boost. I used Agfa CT18 (ASA/ISO 50) in good light, and Ektachrome High Speed (ASA/ISO 160) in bad light. For black and white I settled on Kodak Tri-X.
An obligatory sunset image with the Soligor 400 mm lens (the North Dellen lake in Hälsingland, Sweden, where we had a summer house):

This low cost tele, with its slow speed and woobly mount, was of course nothing for sharpness fanatics. However, I think the bokeh and smooth subject isolation with the shallow depth of field still looks good, compared to for instance to what we get with todays DSLRs with crop sensors and 70-300 lenses.

An image with the 50 mm Yashinon, which was very good lens, as most 50 mm lenses are.

Then came the day when I got the opportunity to do a real photo assaignment. The photographer my father had booked for a job got sick, so I got the chance (see the “Tri-X stories“). It was a small series of reportages about the life of “Gastarbeiters” in Germany, mostly turkish immigrants. The newspaper liked the photos, the story was published and I earned some money.

I also learned a few things that made me re-think my choice of photo gear: It was fiddly working with stop down manual metering in a fast changing situation. Switching lenses was painfully slow with the M42 screw mount. You have very little use of a very long, very slow lens. A wide angle is really needed when you work close to people. All things considered, it was time to switch again.
This time my choice fell on a Konica T3 Autoreflex. (See next chapter)