The Cameraventures #saveanalogcameras movement – get involved!

Some time ago a chap called Matt got in touch with me with the suggestion that I should create an index of film camera specialist repair companies on a page of my website. A good idea, I thought so I did it… though I’ve never had the time to make it less crap than just a post of poorly organised information. You can find the post here.

Then, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a chap called Martin who’d shared my the page on a popular film photography FB group. It is his belief that information like this needs to be collated properly as part of the process of maintaining the film photography community and industry. I must admit, I thought he had a pretty strong point.

Whilst staring at my page, wondering how to make it less rubbish. I remembered there was a similar directory on EMULSIVE, in this case for film dev/print/scan shops around the world – find it here. I emailed Martin back with a link to the Emulsive map. He seemed suitably impressed, but was interested in the idea of these maps being combined into a single map of film photography related companies. Another great idea.

A few days later I was chatting to Em from Emulsive on the phone talking about this idea, his website, my website, and what could be done to combine our pages. A nice idea he agreed, but he also told me about a chap called Juho who was working toward the idea of collating all this sort of information, with what might be considered an even higher purpose.

A week or so later Juho from Cameraventures got in touch with a link to a page on his website that talks in some depth about some of the problems the film photography community is heading for if we don’t start putting our heads together to do something about it. It would be pointless me paraphrasing, as you can read the page here.

Me and Juho followed up a few days later still with a quick and quite interesting chat on the phone about some of his ideas and goals. This guy has big plans, many of which feel like they reflect the motives of all the other people in this little anecdote. It seems there might be a bit of a groundswell of ideas to build upon the film photography community and industry. And that’s got to be a good thing!

All the plans Juho has start in one place, that place being a survey to help build a map of the world’s best analogue photography resources. You can find the survey here. If you need an incentive to fill it in bigger than helping to save/build upon the analogue photography community and industry, he is giving one of a bunch of very nice cameras to one of the folks who answers the questions! So go now, fill it in!

I love the film photography community – all of the interactions and actions I have mentioned in this post are exactly why!

Share this post: