Enter our July Photo competition for a chance to win an Olympus Mju II, OM-4 Ti, Pentax 6×7, or a Hasselblad XPAN! Read below!
To celebrate the 3 year journey of the Camera Rescue project we will host a photo competition during the whole month of July. The aim of the competition is to help the community spread the word that there is a need to preserve film cameras for the current generation, and especially future ones.
A few important things can be accomplished if people know that the future of film cameras is a little fragile. Yes we can take better care of our things, learn how to repair, and support companies/labs that give back to the community. But just as important are the millions and millions of film cameras out there, owned by those that don’t know what to do with them. Let people know you are interested in film cameras and you will be surprised cameras popping up from the peoples closets and into your hands. Use them, sell them, give them away.. the point is to introduce more cameras into the community of the people that want them.
And if you see opportunities [to rescue cameras] you can’t take advantage of because of time, or financials, or knowledge, reaching out to somebody who can is a great help for all of us. (See how we rescue cameras after we find them)
Join the competition, and shout out your love for classic cameras.
Camera Rescue 3rd Year Recap
The last year was very big for Camera Rescue, with us going from 35 000 rescued cameras to 53 421. We are speeding up, even though most of the cameras still get processed only in our Camera Rescue Center in Tampere Finland – not worldwide through an app and partners like we aimed to in our last years anniversary manifesto.
Our forever project of getting the Camera Rescue app ready seems to drag on and we are still clearing up some of the software issues from shutting down Cameraventures. Both are due to issues out of our control by third parties we relied on to get the work done, and them being a year late has negatively affected our motivation and positivity.
But as we have waited for the app, what we have been able to do is help develop the centers workflow and start bringing the Cameramakers.com knowhow to the next generation. We are collecting spare parts, repair manuals and machinery to the best of our ability and preparing to have analog cameras here still in 2050.
The other thing we have aimed to do is spread the word that cameras need to be found and rescued. Both in the analog communities in Europe and the community online. Remember that 95% of the film cameras produced are not accounted for – ie they are not in the use of the analog photographic community – so there is a lot to find still. We can see it in Finland where we were featured in three of the major 8 newspapers in the country in the last year – each time hundreds or even thousands of cameras are offered to us and after not having been used for 15 years. But even when the whole photo community in Finland knows about us, still we hear the stories of cameras being thrown away or recycled weekly. It makes me wonder how bad the situation might be elsewhere.
But alas, no more gloomy stuff. Here are a few highlights from the last year.
2018 Camera Rescue Highlights
2. Camera Rescue TV at Photokina 2018
We had a booth at Photokina 2018. The tiny 4m2 booth was puny, but expensive. As we tried to maximize the effect of the 4m2 for the analog community we paired up with Nicolas Llasera to create Camera Rescue TV from Photokina. With an impressive array of people interviewed, the TV turned out to be the single most important resource of news from Photokina to the analog community.
2. Setting up an international crew and a team in Paris During the last year we have started setting up a crew of freelancers from around Europe to manage the growing demand to test and inspect larger collections of cameras onsite around the continent. Through them we were already able to find several retiring repair shops that were going to trash their spare parts and thousands of cameras that have not moved for 15 years from their storage. In November 2018 I stayed in Paris for a month to help set up a basis for a team there with Nation Photo, which we will be growing in the future. You can follow them on Instagram here.
3. Arranging Finland Film Foto Fair (f4)
As Photokina 2019 was cancelled, we wanted to try to collect analog minds into the same place. The first ever Finland Film Foto Fair (f4) was created with a bit hasty of a timetable but Fotoimpex, Adox, Silberra films and the Nordic distributors of Kodak, Polaroid, Ilford came to the show. One of the big highlights was a keynote given by Mirko from Adox that you should see if you haven’t already. Another major highlight of the fair was the camera gear Outlet.
4. Eurotour 2019, Nordic tour 2018 + Outlet
Once we had setup the Outlet in Helsinki, we decided we could take it for a tour. During May-June 2019 the Outlet visited Analogue Now conference in Berlin, Bievres Photo fair in Paris and Revela-t photo fair in Barcelona. You can read more about it here and about the Nordic tour that happened last fall here.
5. Recruiting 10 new people in the greatest Analog work interview of the millennia.
To check the original recruitment page go here. As I write this I can hear the first two of four summer interns checking cameras in the other room. Two rooms further than that are two cameramakers apprentices learning the trade much quicker than the Masters expected. In the third room there is a new member in the Kamerastore product staff and Jordan is hopefully spell checking this for me, even though he works mostly with the Kamerastore marketing team. Also in the table next to me there is Eetu that now forms the other half of the CR core team.
The next 12 months
During the next year we will still have major challenges to face. There is scaling the daily life at the Rescue Center, which is now that the original concept is setup in fact more of a dilemma for Cameramakers and Kamerastore than us, but luckily we have many new areas to work with. We hope to get to the next phases of camera rescuing soon, where we can help all of the analog community and industry around the world do it easily with the app.
Our aim is still to bring much of what we know and learn to the worldwide community. Spreading the word is getting harder as the algorithms of social media are getting really tricky and annoying to navigate, especially if you do not have money to use for it. Talking about money I do still want to thank Kamerastore for continuing to support financially the CR project to do all the things above, even though most of them are not generating direct sales for them. They also sponsor the main prize of this competition.
So all in all it has been a rollercoaster of a year again, with many failures and a few successes too. Next year when I am writing this we will have barely 6 months left to hit the 100 000 camera goal setup in 2017, so I hope we are at 80 000 cameras by then. Now we are at 53 507 so 86 cameras found a new home from when I started writing this article yesterday. We might make the goal with the teams we have setup now, but if we could find a way for the community to participate, we will definitely make it. The next year will be a year of searching for new solutions. Thank you for being a part of this journey.
Juho, Camera Rescue
July Photo Competition 2019
How to enter?
Make an Instagram or Twitter post showing a film camera you have *rescued and the story behind it with #camerarescue in the post. Include pictures taken with it for bonus points. *A rescued camera means finding, fixing, or buying a camera that wasn’t being used until it met you.
How does the competition work?
We have 5 goals we would like to meet to help spread the work of Camerarescue. We will award the prize # matching the total number of goals met at the end of the competition, the grand prize being an XPAN if we meet all 5 goals.
What are the possible prizes?
Prize #1 – Starter SLR Kit
Konica Autoreflex TC (SLR) with 40mm f1.8 lens
Awarded if 1 goal is met.
Prize #2 – Cult Compact
Olympus Mju II (point & shoot) with 35mm f2.8 lens
Awarded if any 2 goals are met.
Prize #3 – “OMG, Titanium?”
Olympus OM-4 Ti (SLR) with OM 24mm f2.8 lens
Awarded if any 3 goals are met.
Prize #4 – “Heavy Duty”
Pentax 6×7 (Medium Format) with 67 Macro 135mm f4 lens
Awarded if any 4 goals are met.
Prize #5 – “XPensive”
Hasselblad XPAN (Panoramic Rangefinder) with 45mm f4 lens
Awarded if all 5 goals are met.
What 5 goals can be met to unlock the prizes?:
#camerarescue reaches 2000 uses
@Camerarescue reaches 40k followers on Instagram
@kamerastorecom reaches 20k followers on Instagram
We reach 55 555 rescued cameras (counter at camerarescue.org – goes up whenever an item has found a new home through Kamerastore.com)
Email newsletter subscribers for Kamerastore reaches 10k (now 7.7k)
Selecting a winner:
One winner will be selected by a unanimous decision between @roman0ff, @camerarescue and @cameraville. We will judge the winner on 3 things:
The image of the camera itself (is the image pleasing or creative?)
The story behind the camera (Where did you get it, what have you done with it etc. )
The connection between the photo(s) & the story of the camera (If you rescued a camera from your Grannies attic in the US, maybe don’t show a photo of it surrounded by beer and sausage from your last trip to Germany).
When is the winner announced?
2nd of August 2019