A boss asked his employee if she would clean out an old storage compartment for him after a tenant had moved out. He said that she might find a few old cameras and could keep anything she did find. But when she walked into the abandoned storage compartment, she wasn’t fully prepared for the scene in front of her.
Kristen and her partner agreed to help her boss out, and as old film camera enthusiasts, they were excited to think they might find a few old cameras. In reality, over 2,000 and lenses were waiting for them, many of them pretty valuable.
“My boss told us that there were some old cameras in there and that we could keep whatever we wanted as payment for cleaning everything out as long as we made enough to pay for the labor,” she told Kosmo Foto. “We figured there would be maybe 20-30 cameras in there until we opened the first box, and it was filled with Miranda T’s and Orion Miranda T’s. That’s when we were like, ‘OK, there’s probably 100-200 cameras in here…’”
A museum
Kristen has essentially inherited a lifetime’s collection of film camera history in one go. She and her partner are still bringing home camera boxes, unpacking them, and starting to catalog everything. “At first, it was great, we’d bring home a few boxes, and it was like Christmas every time,” she says.
Can you ever have too many cameras?
The couple lives in a tiny apartment in Massachusetts, and things are getting out of hand. “We have way too much camera equipment and not nearly enough space,” Kristen tells DIYP. This a problem I, and probably many of our readers, can empathize with!
Some of the more interesting finds include a Minolta MD 135mm 1:2 lens, a Minolta CLE in a bag with two M-Rokkor lenses and a Leica lens, five Minolta SR-2’s, three Orion Miranda T’s (all mostly mint, one with a beautiful Zunow lens) 10 Miranda Ts, one of them with an Ofunar lens and another with a Zunow, Minolta XK, and a Soligor Miranda 85mm 1.8 lens.
Kristen says that she plans to keep some of the cameras for her own use as she studied film photography earlier in her life. However, due to needing to keep a handle on the space issue, she has set up an eBay shop to sell the other cameras. If you’re a film camera enthusiast, it certainly could be worth a look.
[Images: All courtesy of Kristen*]
*Name withheld for privacy reasons
