Camera Rescue 10 years Anniversary

The tenth anniversary of the Camera Rescue project is soon here and we should be celebrating. And celebrate we will. At the bottom you will find an invitation to join us in August, in Finland, but there is also something we need to do: address the big elephant in the community.

To our team, the most interesting part of the photographic world was, for years, seeing if film would truly have a renaissance or not. We are deep camera and photo nerds and for us it seemed clear: There is sufficient passion for film photography in people all around the world for a true revival. However, as too many of us know from some other parts of life, passion is not always enough to keep something alive when the realities of finances and legislation can create impassable obstacles.

Yet in 2024-2025 we saw something that was not on our bingo cards when the camera rescue project was set up: 4 new color film factories and 4 new film cameras. I did a YouTube video quite a while ago about this - and that was the culmination point to me: Film was officially back, alive and secure. That left me in a bit of an empty emotional space: what now? I was happy for the community and industry, but I was so used to fighting what looked for a long time like an impossible battle. At the same time Kamerastore had started to train camera technicians internally - and the Camera Rescue Technician school was not needed in the form it was between 2021-2024. I'll add a small ps. text at the end of the article about exactly that, as I know many of you are still looking for a way to work with camera repair.

One of OG class of 2021s fooling around as a Team leader nowadays.

But then I started to see the camera rescue logo all over LinkedIn. Or actually it wasn’t the camera rescue logo, but a “content credentials badge” - https://contentcredentials.org/ - with strong similarities to the Camera Rescue logo. The badge proves the origin of an image through some digital signature type of thing. Seeing the familiar logo everywhere might have gotten me even more down: No mission anymore, no need to organize a school anymore and even the identity of the project used by large corporations. But it didn’t. It sparked something else in me. The realisation was that photography is in a new sort of fight today. It's not a fight of film photography vs digital photography. It is not even a fight of aesthetics, soul, tones - or something that is more or less a question of personal preference. The new fight for photography we are seeing unfold every day, is one of the truth. In essence - is the photo of something that existed at a space in time, or not: has it been captured or generated? I am actually surprised that at this point we are still in a position where I can talk about this fight in the future tense. AI is perfectly capable of deceiving almost everyone already - it even creates realistic video, which is much more complicated than photographs, and often far more convincing. My hunch has been that we are one big news cycle away from this fight really flaming up. We need just one world changing image for the discussion to really start. One photo like that of the Napalm Girl, Afghan Girl or the latest presidential bleeding ear photo, to go through all main media channels as a “real photo” and then to be confirmed to be a generated one. That hasn't quite yet happened. But what has happened is that AI has already started deeply integrating into phone photography. Google and Samsung both promote changing your photos time of day or year, or removing people from photos through AI. I manned VALOI’s stand at Japan’s CP+ trade show this year, and the guys next to us had a phone attachment camera called Caira, with Nano Banana built in. With it you can tell it to edit photos - and it does so with great precision. This video about the camera and subject has blown up on YouTube: But maybe the question is, what has changed? Photoshopping has been around for most of my life. Why fight technological progress?

Visiting pretty much every big international photography show in the last 10 years (This in 2024 Salon de la Photo in Paris), I have heard so many stories about why people are passionate about film.

Here we can return to the fight for film to stay alive. We can talk about tones, grain or even the longevity of negatives as a data preservation factor, but I don't think those are the core reasons people were willing to take a stand for film. Across meetups in four continents in the last 10 years I have noticed that people are passionate about film because of one simple reason: it helps them connect better with other people. Maybe they can be more emotionally available when taking the photo. Maybe they have met new people and friends through the film photo community. Maybe their friends have cherished the physical photos they gifted them in a different depth than a whatsapp dump of 20 phone photos. Anyhow the storyline was clear: Film was worth preserving as a medium because it connected humans better to real life vs digital photography. Arguably the same can be said for digital photography vs generated photography, and the contrast might be even stronger. So I predict a new wave of community rallying is ahead of us: The fight for Real Photography.

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What does that mean for us in Finland? Or you guys reading this that have been your own part of the global challenge of rescuing film cameras to be used again?

I think it changes everything, and nothing. My dream is that the exceptional culture in the film community globally spreads to this real photography community. During these 10 years I have been served the most amazing steak in the South of France in a farm, taken to the top of a mountain to sleep in a car in Oman and gotten offered a place to rest on the road more times than I can count - all because of the community. But the culture I talk about is even more amazing than hospitality towards me.

Mountaintop in Oman.

It’s the hospitality towards different people. I have seen very different types of people meet for the first time on a photowalk or film+beverage gathering, and connect on a deep level in a matter of minutes. Pink and white hair sharing experiences with each other as equals. Hands with fingers as thick as cucumbers passing a camera to the most delicate hands that need to be micrometer precise with a scalpel. Eyes of all colors looking deep into each other - just because they share a passion. Real people making real connections. But photography doesn't limit itself to diverse people meeting and connecting over a hobby - there are plenty of hobbies that can make that happen. Photography in itself has a huge impact - especially when done with intentionality. In a family gathering (or any sort of community actually) it won't matter how many photos of the delicious food there are or how many selfies were taken with the party dress to fill a social media that disappears in 24 hours. What someone will want to see in 20 years or 50 years is a very different type of set of photos than the 2400 images per year cumulating on an average phone. Those intentionally taken photos will be at the core of the Real Photography movement, or so I like to think. Real people taking Real photographs with Real Cameras. Framing what are the memories of families, communities and even whole societies - like photography has done for the last 150 years. I'll personally do my share on film, but I don't really care if someone does it on a 2008 DSLR or a 2018 mirrorless as long as it gets done. THE FUTURE

The Camera Rescue project was set up to rescue 100 000 cameras by 2020. It was a numerical, concrete goal that nowadays feels quite distant as it was over 5 years ago. Cameras get repaired, technicians and mechanics trained and Kamerastore has grown to serve so many people in a year that they would not fit in any stadium in Finland. The 100 000 goal was supposed to be a global one at the launch of the project, but it ended up happening almost exclusively through Finland as we wanted to be sure how to keep count and the quality of the work. If you are numerically oriented and would like to know where we are by now, the number was 281 000 last time I checked.However the project has always been bigger than what we do in Finland. The impact was never just Finland though. I have gotten messages from South America to Mongolia and Indonesia to Norway where the project has inspired local teams to do the same. The teams have varied, some being one man stores while some were community hubs with tens of people. So that's why we want to celebrate the project's 10 year anniversary and look towards the future together. To do that we have chosen the weekend of 14th to 16th of August to gather in our hometown, Tampere. We know Finland is literally at the end of the world, so we have no clue if anyone is able to come. To figure out if it will be just local friends, or a handful of us and some Frenchies, or something bigger we have devised - in true camera rescue spirit - a google docs form! You can find the form here. Please answer and let us know what you would be interested in and we organise accordingly. Once we know many Saunas we might need to book, walkthrough groups to organize and what kind of content people are looking for, then we will let people know the plan and how to officially join. For anyone that can't make it, there will be online content from the days - this is just the beginning of a new era in the camera rescue story.

Hope you make great memories until then!

• Juho
  

To the Form

PS. I promised a short update on the camera technician school: Our last full class ended in 2024. In between 2021 and 2024 we had three classes with a bit over 20 students in total, and from them over half work with us fulltime to this day. While the classes don’t exist anymore, it actually has not slowed down the amount of people learning the skills in 2025-26. The style has just changed to 1:1 teaching while being already employed. This teaching on the job method seems to be more flexible and stress-free, especially for the ones teaching. This means that if you are looking for a way to be able to do camera technician work, usually the best option is to look for open positions in Kamerastores HR page here. The jobs you are looking for are usually titled “Junior Technician” or something like that, but obviously any position is a step into the team. I usually remember to send Camera Rescue email subscribers a notice / or make noise in Camera Rescue Instagram when junior spots are available, but sadly I havent always done so. Last year there were over 20 open positions across the company, so either revisit the page - or subscribe to the Kamerastore newsletter to be sure.