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The Camera Rescue Ireland and France Special 2025 released on YouTube

  • Jun 26
  • 5 min read

📺 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/VntwzmSMsPM

This time the roadtrip took me to two cities that are actually fun to put side by side: Dublin and Lyon. They're roughly the same size, both have boomed over the last couple of decades, and both are packed with students. Film photography is alive and well in each of them — but, interestingly, for quite different reasons.

Dublin runs on a strong online community: as a result of a big shared language pool where information flows fast, and a photo-club culture that really looks after its students. Lyon leans the other way — a cluster of entrepreneur-driven small businesses all trying to make film accessible to everyone, in a city cheap enough to leave students room to experiment. Same destination, two completely different roads to get there. That contrast is basically the whole episode.

Ireland: the magic of a good meetup

I was in Dublin for a circular-economy electronics conference (I was giving a talk), but the real reason I get excited about traveling these days is that I've made it a habit: wherever I land, I try to find the local film community and connect with it somehow.

In Dublin that community is strong. They have their own Discord, their own ways of keeping in touch, and when we gathered at the Stag's Head it turned into one of those evenings that reminds you why any of this matters. Newcomers who'd just shot their first roll sitting next to people who'd been doing it for fifty years. Immigrants and lifelong locals. Academics, startup folks, students, shopkeepers — teenagers all the way to retirees, switching tables, swapping camera talk.

The world feels increasingly separated by screens, so getting people from that many different backgrounds into one loud Irish pub to talk about cameras felt genuinely magical. If you've never started one of these in your own neighbourhood — try it and see what happens. My heart was full.

I shot mostly Opticolour 200 and a bit of SantaColor 100 around the parks and streets, using autumn Dublin as a colour-and-latitude test. Opticolour is a fun, characterful film, though it doesn't love being underexposed — something I got to test the hard way as the light ran out. You can see the comparisons the best on the video, but here is one image to fill the blog that didnt make it to the video. Opticolour 200 + Nikon FE2 + 50mm f1.4 Summilux R.


France: Meeting with the people who actually make film possible

Lyon's scene has a lot in common with Dublin's — another big university-student city — but here it's the small businesses driving things forward.

First stop was Nation Photo Lyon, run by a local team. Tucked away there was something most people don't know about yet: the AURA LAB scanner. It had literally been installed the day before, and I was one of the first to put film through it. This is a bit of a big deal — arguably the first new industrial-level film scanner built for labs in around 25 years, and it's designed to do exactly what labs need: scan fast.

We developed my Santa and Opticolour rolls in the minilab first (if you've never seen film go through a C41 machine, the episode walks through the whole leader-and-tape ritual that's somehow identical in every lab on earth), then handed them to the Aura. The clever part is how it keeps quality while going quick: instead of decimation — older scanners just skipping pixels to speed up — the Aura does binning, combining pixels into bigger ones for a better signal-to-noise ratio and more detail even at lower resolutions. The result was genuinely impressive straight off the sensor, before any correction. Five years of R&D you can actually see.

I also got a long chat with Max, who's been running labs for 24 years, and is now treating some of his Noritsu machines naughtily — converting E-6 processors into black-and-white ones. They don't love it, but they're sturdy.

From there it was over to Les Ateliers de Marinette, a wonderful vintage shop where every visitor — no matter their age or where they're from — seems to find something that pulls up a personal memory. The kind of place that's worth a detour if you're ever in Lyon.

We wrapped with a spontaneous photo walk — a "let's just put it out there and see who shows up" meetup. Ten people came, the sun cooperated, and we ended up at a Roman amphitheatre with views stretching toward the Alps (technically Mont Blanc, if you squint). The Romans really did know where to put their amphitheatres. I finally let myself shoot some Portra 800 here too — a film I usually save because I already know its colours and it's not cheap, but Lyon in that light earned it.

A note on community

Personally there's one thread running through both cities, it's this: the products we remake, restore, and keep available at Camera Rescue and Kamerastore only mean something because of the people on the other end — the ones in these meetups, opening those packages, shooting these films. Getting to meet them face to face, in two cities at once, is about the best part of this job.

I only had time to scrape the surface of two lovely cities and their communities. If you've got something to add — a place I missed, a person I should've met — please drop it in the comments on the video.

đź”— Links mentioned in the video

Film stocks & gear

The scanning

Film labs & vintage camera shops

Dublin film YouTuber

⏱️ Sections of the video

  • 00:00 — Intro & trip summary

  • 01:46 — Arriving in Dublin, Ireland

  • 03:30 — Film choice & shooting Opticolour 200

  • 06:07 — Dublin analog community meetup

  • 11:12 — Traveling to Lyon, France

  • 11:49 — Visiting Nation Photo Lyon

  • 14:33 — How film is developed in a minilab

  • 15:50 — Interview: 24 years of Noritsu machines with Max

  • 24:19 — Testing the new AURA LAB scanner

  • 28:44 — Reviewing the AURA scans & colours

  • 36:04 — Organizing a spontaneous photo walk

  • 38:14 — Vintage cameras & antiques at Ateliers Marinette

  • 48:42 — Lyon photo walk & Roman amphitheatre

  • 52:51 — Outro & heading home

Thank you so much to everyone who helped me understand the local scene a little better — in the interviews, at the meetups, on the photowalk. À la prochaine. 🎞️

 
 
 

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