The 22 Year Old Repairing Old Film Cameras

Old film cameras captivate so many people in the photography industry, but they are a depletable resource that will naturally dwindle. This 22 year old is working on countering that trend.

I love film cameras. I have shelves and storage filled with them. I only shoot with a couple, but I love more about them than their function; their aesthetics, their history, their story. Although I — and family members on my behalf — buy these cameras, a lot of them wouldn't work well enough to take any images. I've thought about sending them off to be repaired, but it's something I'd like to do myself. Well, that's what this one gentleman has done with great success.

Pierro Pozella is a Master's student from Surrey, England, whom after working in a charity shop, became tired of seeing old cameras being thrown away. Without being able to find many resources on how he could fix them, and with knowledgeable folk being unhelpful, Pozella set out to reverse engineer the camera bodies and teach himself. Before long, he was getting requests from other people and it has become a flourishing business called PPP Camera Repairs.

It's great to see people repairing old cameras, particularly when they're this young!

Robert K Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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7 Comments

Nice

A breath of fresh air.

I love things like this.

Pretty cool.

Old school repair guys should be ashamed of themselves. So sad the old sods are secretive of repair knowledge. It's not like these are common use cameras anymore, and most of those guys are going to be dead soon anyway! :-D WTF are those guy thinking? Hats off to this kid for his diligence and perseverance in obtaining his skills. Glad that he wants to share what he's learned.

The future looks brighter with young people such as these two :)

I need to get a Mamiya 90mm K/L lens repaired for my RB67. But England might be a little too far to send it.