Walking into the newly opened CameraMall on E. Washington is like entering a time warp. A whole store filled with cameras! Even its generic name evokes the mail-order camera stores that congregated in lower Manhattan in the 1980s.
CameraMall deals in both new digital and vintage film cameras. Desmond Kolean-Burley, the store’s youthful owner, says digitals start at about $500 for a basic package with one detachable lens. In the last five years, he says, the market for “point and shoots” started to dry up when smartphones replaced them. “But the good news is, it got people taking more pictures, and more interested in photography, so more people are taking the next step,” usually choosing an 18- to 55-mm zoom for their first lens. “Most people like zoom.” Like so many appliances, it allows you to stay in one place while electronics do the work: “We used to have to zoom with our feet.” When they move on to a second lens, he says, most choose a telephoto, something like a 55- to 250-mm zoom.
Kolean-Burley, twenty-three, grew up mostly on the west side of the state. A serious still photographer with a degree in HCI (human-computer interaction) from U-M, he worked at a camera store, the similarly generic-sounding but family-owned Camera Shop in Muskegon, in the summers. The Camera Shop’s owners, Craig and Ann Kufta, believed in him so strongly that they offered to back him in whatever business he chose to open in Ann Arbor. The idea, he says modestly, is “they were offering to give me a pile of money, with the idea that I would eventually turn it into a bigger pile of money.”
A camera store wasn’t his first thought: “There’s such a high [financial] barrier to entry.” Stocking a showroom full of cameras starting at $500 isn’t cheap, but he “couldn’t believe Ann Arbor didn’t have a one. It’s an affluent, cultured population.” The last camera store in the area, Dexter’s Huron Camera, closed in December. After making such a huge investment in inventory, it’s “a bit crushing when people walk in and say ‘you don’t have what I’m looking for,'” Kolean-Burley adds, “but I’m doing my best to listen.” He carries Olympus and Nikon and hopes to be carrying Canon soon. Canon, he says, is the hands-down industry leader and is careful about doling out dealerships. “They are looking for you to sell $200,000 worth of cameras the first year, and that’s a fair bit of coin.”
The rest of the space in the small, sunny shop–which hasn’t seen retail traffic since Laura Ashley closed in the 1990s–is filled with accessories, supplies, and used film cameras. In the back room he’s gradually adding services, like color processing, scanning, and poster-size laser printing. “The services are important. I don’t think I could make it on hard goods alone.”
He’s been surprised at the local interest in film cameras. Less than a month after his soft opening, he’d already sold more than 100 rolls of film, “a lot of it to A3C3”–the Ann Arbor Area Crappy Camera Club. And in early May he sold a number of film cameras to participants in a U-M English department program before they left for New Hampshire’s backcountry on a six-week retreat.
Employee Charlie Samuels, doing a quick Google in the back of the shop to check on the retreat details, relates: “It’s on Lake Winnipesaukee. They can’t bring any computers or electronics, but they can bring film cameras. I’ve known people who have been on it. They’ve found it to be quite a spiritual journey.”
He and Kolean-Burley immediately break up laughing about what a low bar there is for a spiritual journey in these tech-laden days: “I was away from my cell phone for twelve hours. It was totally a spiritual journey,” Kolean-Burley intones.
CameraMall, 518 E. Washington, 997-5031. Tues.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., closed Sun. & Mon. cameramall.com
