7 hours ago
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Fifty thousand vintage cameras and lenses sit inside a Finnish warehouse, and most of them arrived broken. A collection that size raises a simple question: how do you find anything worth shooting with, and does the vault actually hold the one lens you have been chasing for years?
That hunt drives a two-day tour that Mathieu Stern takes through Camera Store, a company based in Tampere that repairs and resells old gear. Stern first visited six years ago when the operation was small, and returning for its 10-year anniversary means walking through a place with roughly 15,000 items listed online and another 30,000 in some stage of checking and repair. His guide, listing manager Connor, opens what he calls the treasure trove, a room stacked with screw-mount Leicas and rows of M2 and M3 bodies waiting for hands that know how to bring them back. Some repairs take days. The whole system runs on codes, where a body gets pulled from the warehouse by number and matched to a technician who knows that specific fault.
The finds get stranger as the tour moves. Stern handles an Agfa 35mm TLR, a twin-lens design almost never made in that format, along with a Kodak Medalist II that has no comfortable way to hold it and an Ihagee Exakta that counts as one of the first widely popular SLRs. There is a Nikon L35 AW AF built to survive shallow water, a pair of Linhof Technorama 617 panoramic cameras that eat 120 film, and a transparent Ricoh FF-9 special edition. Connor pulls a Leica post camera used decades ago by telephone offices to photograph their call ledgers, then a Nikon 8mm fisheye with filters built into a rear ring because nothing fits on that bulging front element. A Hasselblad XPan, sold by Fuji as the TX-1, gets its moment, as does a Pentax 67 with the 105mm f/2.4 and its wooden grip.
The prices climb fast in a few spots. Three copies of the Canon 50mm f/0.95 sit in one place, and Connor guesses the stack in his hands runs near 10,000 euros before deciding not to think about it. Stern's personal target turns out to be a Canon 85mm f/1.2 aspherical in Canon FD mount, cleaned and running close to new. Between those, the tour keeps landing on cheap oddities: the Konica Tomato, the yellow Minolta Weathermatic, and the Olympus μ II, which sells for around 550 euros and refuses to stay in stock. Connor's own favorite point-and-shoot is the Konica Big Mini, one of the smallest 35mm cameras ever made.
The pull of these cameras tracks a shift that has been building for years. Film prices and darkroom talk get most of the attention, but the demand Connor describes points somewhere broader: people buying old point-and-shoots and camcorders to record moments without a phone in the loop. The Olympus μ II going for the price of a used mirrorless body is not nostalgia alone. A whole generation grew up with every photo living inside a glowing rectangle, and a fixed-lens 35mm camera forces a different pace, one frame at a time with no screen to check. If you have a drawer of gear you stopped using, that same demand works in your favor. The market Connor works in treats a scuffed 110 camera and a five-figure Leica lens as parts of the same catalog, which means the thing gathering dust at home has a value you can actually look up.
Watch the full vault tour in the video above to see which cameras Stern walks away wanting and how deep the collection really goes.
English (US) ·