The Camera Trading Company, a buyer and seller of vintage photographic equipment in Centretown, has made a big leap into the digital age with the long- awaited launch of its new online store.
The owners of the used- camera shop – which specializes in the sale of film cameras – have for years considered building an online presence, but it wasn’t until recently that the throwback retailer decided to take its futuristic plunge.
“We realized some time ago that a website would help us expand our horizons,” says co-owner Mark Trachtenberg. “But being old and slow it took us a while to get there.”
Trachtenberg, 64, and his business partner Tom Steiner, 69, have been managing the Camera Trading Company since 1981 and although the company has had to change locations various times in its 34-year life, they say it is unlikely that they will be keeping their current location at Bank and Gilmour streets once their lease expires in 2017.
“We’re not likely to renew for another five years,” says Trachtenberg. “We can’t think realistically in terms of working that long so we’re a little unclear as to what form the store will take.”
But it is clear that over the Camera Trading Company’s three-and-a-half decades in business a small fortune of rare cameras have passed through the store’s cluttered doors. However Trachtenberg says that the rarest item that has ever entered the store came through in the mid-1990s and in fact it wasn’t a camera at all, rather it was a lens made by the legendary German manufacturer, Leica.
“There was something about this lens that gave us a hint that it was extremely rare, partly because it wasn’t in the collectors guides and partly because nobody we knew had ever heard of it, so we started doing some research,” Trachtenberg said.
What they would discover is that there were six or less in existence and each of the lenses – which were designed to work well in poor lighting – had been manufactured in Leica’s Canadian factory in Midland, Ont.
“It took us a long time but we figured out that it was a lens that was made –I don’t know if you want to call it for the espionage industry to military specification – for a certain military issue Leica Camera.”
At that time the lens was worth between $10,000-$15,000 but Trachtenberg says today it could easily sell for $100,000.
Their lease may be running out but with a showroom, a backroom and a basement packed full of historic cameras and equipment it is clear that they have no shortage of merchandise, which makes their new online store such a necessity.
“There’s no way in the next two years we’re going to sell out what we’ve got here,” says Trachtenberg.
“I think the plan would be, rather than a retail store to have a warehouse space from which we could sell and ship.”
It’s a decision that has proven popular among the many people in Ottawa who still use film photography.
“It gives people a place to go online to shop for analog equipment,” said Erika Struck, who has worked at GPC Labworks – one of Centretown’s last remaining in-house film developers – for the last five years.
“A lot of young people are into film and experimenting with it,” she continued. “There are a lot of students, as well, so they’re still teaching film in some courses.”
One place in Ottawa that is still avidly teaching film photography is the ByWard Market’s School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), a photography college where all full-time, first-year students learn the basics of photography by using old film cameras.
“These kinds of classes just come back because people really use the resources they know in the digital world and really want to understand the history of the medium so they end up taking these older classes – it’s really interesting to see,” says Claudia Gutierrez director of marketing and development at SPAO.
Gutierrez explains that, for years, the Camera Trading Company has provided SPAO’s students with the cameras and equipment they need for their courses, and says the new online store will be just as valuable to them.
“This store is a bit of an institution here in Ottawa from my understanding,” says Gutierrez, “but the world of retail is really taking a turn… so we’re definitely seeing this shift occur and we’re not really sure where it’s going to go.”
But what is certain is that before the Camera Trading Company can begin building a large online presence, Trachtenberg needs to put all of his merchandise on the website, a process that has so far taken a very long time.
“Since we don’t have a full-time person – data entry clerk – doing this for us, I’m doing it in my spare time as much as I can,” he says. “We could be here for another 20 years and not quite have everything we have already listed.”
Trachtenberg insists, however, that all the extra work is well worth it because it will allow the store to exist in cyberspace even if one day it no longer exists on Ottawa’s streetscape.
“The website will allow us to continue selling whatever we’ve got in a modern functional way.”