It’s that time again! As the rescue center continues to grow we’re seeking people willing to join us in Tampere during the Winter of 2021/2022. It’s a Winter-nship! We’re also planning a new camera mechanic school for the future. If you’re interested in that, there’s more information at the end of the article. You can apply to both or just one through the forms later in the article.
When we recruit, we’re looking for specific types of people. Sometimes they’re mechanically-inclined, sometimes business-savvy, and sometimes creative content generators. This time, we’re looking for people that are interested at rescuing cameras as a future career. This means our selection will be focused on people that have an inherent passion for searching, finding, buying, and selling cameras. You should also be comfortable with customer service. You can apply from anywhere in the world, and we hope the skills you learn here will be applicable almost anywhere.
Our day-to-day here; this is the Awaiting Repair pile.
Winternship
As mentioned above, we’re looking for interns to join us during the next winter. These interns would be more involved in the logistics and rescuing aspects of our business. The Camera Rescue project is quite fluid, though, and interns will likely be exposed to all areas of it. That means sourcing gear, finding basements of spare parts, watching repairs, creating content, and anything else that comes up during the winter.
The goal is to spread our knowhow to new countries so that there will be enough cameras available for future generations. Even with our full effort over the next 10 years here in Finland, we won’t be able to rescue enough cameras for the entire world without expanding.
The goal is that an intern will get to know how the operation works and start doing it locally in their country/area. These international intern positions have no salary, but living & travel expenses are compensated.
Being a part of the crew comes with perks; free developing and scanning at Kameratori’s lab, hefty discounts on everything you might need from the analog world, lots of dark, bitter coffee, and colleagues that will make your odd, analog self feel just about normal. We work 8 hours a day, five days a week, leaving you with a lot of time to explore the long cold dark nights in Finland.
If you have a school internship (business, engineering, logistics, etc.) that you need to complete in the year 2022, you can let us know with this same form.
A naked Nikon on the workbench.
Camera Repair School
If we had a roll of film for every time someone asks us to teach camera repair, we would be bigger than Kodak in the late 90s. So far, all we’ve been able to tell them is that we couldn’t do it. Camera repairs have always been taught in-person by a master, much like a traditional apprenticeship. Nowadays this is increasingly difficult, as masters become less common and less willing/able to teach.
We have Master Jukka here who is willing to teach, but he only speaks Finnish. But now we are working on a camera repair school where real mechanics will be taught. At this stage, we’re simply gauging interest and seeing how many people are interested in a long term apprenticeship. We hold ourselves to high standards and won’t sacrifice these standards for the sake of speed or expediency. Consider this a multi-year investment in your future and the future of analog photography. What we’re offering here cannot be taught online, and we will not be doing online content unless we believe the task can be completed by anyone. We aim to rescue cameras here, and the spread of oversimplified repair knowledge will only lead to greater issues down the line.
Camera Repair Master
Cameramakers needs more cameramakers.
We already have all the qualified mechanical camera repairmen in Finland working on this project, but we need many more. There are 4,000 cameras in our repair queue currently, and this number gets bigger every day even with our team of mechanics working full time. If you have extensive repair knowledge and are willing to relocate to Finland (at least for an introductory period) please do let us know. If you are already retired, but would not mind teaching some of your skills to younger generations, please contact us also!
If any position sparked your interest, fill in the forms here (Winternship & Camera Repair School). We will contact people with additional questions and set up interviews with promising candidates. If you want to send in a letter of intent + resume or need to contact me with any questions that arise, you can email me at nico@camerarescue.org
We are accepting applications through the Winternship form until the 14th of October 2021. The process will continue with one on one interviews during the last weeks of October. Interviews will be done via video call, or visiting us at our office in Tampere.
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