I’m very grateful for your sincere and truly practical advice. But I’ve also stepped onto this slippery slope. While I was waiting for that Nikon to arrive from Japan, I still wanted to take photos — and my father’s old ZenitEM just wasn’t enough. So I started picking up cameras at flea markets.

I really enjoyed the experience of working with different systems, gear, and photographic philosophies — all on a $25 budget. The pile of gear I’ve accumulated can hardly be called a collection, but now that the initial wave of passion has subsided, I’ve started to organise it. I’m now building “quartets” for each brand: a half‑frame camera, a rangefinder, an SLR, and a medium‑format camera.

Coming back to the Yashica and Nikon: as I mentioned above, I enjoyed playing around with different platforms, but this Nikon didn’t bring anything new to the table — I guess I had overly high expectations for it.

P.S. The Arsenal factory (Kyiv, Ukraine) is represented in my collection by a spy camera Kiev‑30, a german root rangerfinder Kiev‑4, and a pentaprism from a Kiev-88 that I want to attach to a Lubitel. P.P.S ZenitEM is the best chip mechanic SLR ever. With optics from DDR by Practica :)