About
I'm Ray Bramall. I served an apprenticeship in instrument repair in the early eighties, spent a decade in a photographic dealer's service department, and started on my own in 1998 when the dealer closed its workshop.
The state of the trade
There were four of us doing this within fifty miles when I started. As far as I can tell there is one other left in the north of England, and he is older than me. Nobody is training for it because there is no volume in it — the work is steady enough for one person and nowhere near enough for two.
Who sends me work
| Families | A projector found while clearing a house, and boxes of film to go with it |
| Collectors | The most demanding and the most interesting. They know what they want |
| Schools and archives | 16mm mostly, usually a machine that has sat since the nineties |
| Artists | Growing. Film is fashionable again in a way I did not see coming |
What I've learned
That most machines are not broken, they are dried out. That the customer's description of the fault is right about half the time and worth listening to anyway. And that the worst damage is almost always done by somebody trying one more time to see if it works.
What happens eventually
I'm sixty-three. I've had two people ask about learning the work and neither followed through. The lathe, the stock and the notes will go somewhere sensible when the time comes, and if you're seriously interested in the trade, write — I'd rather hand it on than sell it for scrap.