#Shutter #Shock #Couple #Discovers #Cameras #Abandoned #Storage #Unit
Told they could keep whatever they found, a Massachusetts couple couldn’t picture finding hordes of valuable cameras and lenses in jam-packed storage space.
Picture this: A Massachusetts couple’s talent for organization and eagerness to work resulted in them being asked to clean out a jam-packed storage unit and keep whatever they found. The owner of the unit had died, and the locker had sat untouched for a few years. The owner of the facility wanted it empty. The couple were told there might be “some cameras” in the mountains of cardboard boxes.
Turns out, the facility owner was slightly off in his estimate.
Image courtesy Kristen Cusumano
Within weeks, Kristen Cusumano and her boyfriend, Fridrik Fridriksson, had opened boxes with 1,000 film cameras and roughly 1,000 lenses. The collection was described by a photo company as an “entire film camera museum.”
“[We] got excited thinking we might find something like three or four cameras,” Cusumano said. “When [Fridrik] brought the first few boxes to our apartment we figured we might have 100-200 cameras in the unit! When we brought all of the camera boxes to our apartment, we realized we were in WAY over our heads.
Image courtesy Kristen Cusumano
“At first it was great, we’d bring home a few boxes and it was like Christmas every time; we never knew what we were going to see in the next box. The excitement of unpacking each box, pulling out all these mint condition cameras, researching them and seeing what they were worth … it was really fun,” Cusumano told Kosmo Foto, which first reported the story.
“After a few weeks we realized that the boxes of cameras were endless.”
Image courtesy Kristen Cusumano
Among the brands now crammed into the couple’s small apartment were: Miranda, Minolta, FED, Voigtlander, Zorki, Zenit, Fujica, Yashica, Pentax, Praktica, Mamiya Sekor, Exakta, Olympus, Exa, Petri, Konica, and TLRs. There were also cases, flashes, tripods, adapters, filters, body caps, lens caps, magazines, mounts, books, pamphlets, price guides, and service manuals to open up a store.
The couple are selling the cameras and equipment. The most valuable so far is a Minolta MD 135mm 1:2 lens that sold for $2,340, a Minolta CLE in a bag with two M-Rokkor lenses, and a Leica lens.
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