Visiting the Camera Rescue Project in Finland: A Vintage Camera Paradise

Photographer and YouTuber Mathieu Stern recently got to visit one of the coolest places on earth for camera collectors: The Camera Rescue Project, one of the largest vintage camera collections in Europe.

The Camera Rescue Project is an organization from Finland that is dedicated to preserving cameras for future generations. Their stated goal is to find, repair, and “rescue” 100,000 vintage cameras by 2020; according to the counter on the project’s homepage shows that they’re a little over halfway there.

And who better to visit and tour you around their home base in Finland than Mathieu Stern, weird lens expert and lover of vintage gear?

The beginning of the video consists of a tour of the Kamera Store showroom where rescued Camera Rescue Project cameras are sold, before diving into the actual guts of the Project where they are currently working to repair some 2,000 old cameras while they continue to receive hundreds more.

In the end, Stern walks away with a bunch of cool new “weird lenses” to test out in Finland, but that is going to be the subject of another video.

For now, if you want to see inside The Camera Rescue Project and learn more about this awesome vintage camera repair enterprise, watch the full video up top or check out this deep dive by Cameraville from earlier this year.

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