This is NOT an appeal, but rather a request for advice.
Whilst climbing a volcano in Congo recently I befriended an American chap who spends six months every year living in and assisting in a small Rwandan orphanage that looked after kids from the street. Because I was a freelance photographer and had my camera I was asked if I wouldn’t mind taking some photos for them when I was in Kigali (where it’s based and where I was travelling to next).
So I was there taking some photos and the kids are fantastic. There was a range of ages from 7 or 8 all the way up to 19 and 20 where they are years behind at school but finally getting the education they need. One of the older kids was showing a great interest in photography. Turns out he had assisted a local photographer a couple of times and showed some promise. But he couldn’t consider trying to start any sort of career without the use of a camera and there was no way he or the orphanage could afford to buy one - especially as Rwanda is hardly a hotbed of second hand-photographic shops. A couple of other kids also expressed an interest and a some local photographers have offered to teach them.
So I though it’d be a nice gesture to try to source some sort of really old, unwanted, SLR that they could at least learn their craft with. Film SLRs are cheap and easy to find, but they would not be able to afford the film and even if they could where could they develop it? They do however have laptops that people have previously donated for school work, so they could get the photos off the cameras using those. I think I can get old digital point and shoots very easily but not sure you could learn the craft of professional photography that easily with those (admittedly you can a bit, but imagine taking a 15 year old Fujifilm camera to a wedding?)
So I wonder if anyone has any good ideas for sourcing some old digital SLRs at a cheap price. I would be happy to pay a bit but not sure if I can rely on the cheap ones on eBay!
Before I go ahead and buy off eBay I thought I’d ask the Dope if they had any better ideas.
PS: the orphanage is this one: https://www.ubakaurwanda.org.uk
Anyway, it’s great to bring attention to this little house in Kigali. It’s run by a Rwandan guy and his English wife who have three of their own kids but have invited 20 or so kids to share their home, pay for their schooling, and have somewhere safe to spend their nights.
Ah, you’re about a year too late. I could have sent you my Nikon D-100 and a couple of lenses instead of selling it on ebay. You might check with vocational schools that have photography classes. I donated two Nikon N70 bodies to one of those after I bought the above camera.
KEH Camera has Nikon D60 bodies for $126 each in “excellent” condition and $89 for “bargain” condition. I’ve bought “bargain” gear from KEH before and it turned out to be fine quality, usually just with some cosmetic blemishes. KEH has a great return policy. If something’s fucked up with the gear you bought from them, they’ll refund it. They’re not fly-by-night eBay-level dudes, they’re an established and trusted institution.
Here’s a link to bargain-grade lenses for Nikon SLRs, sorted from low to high price, with many options in the $50 range and even below.
I’d recommend sticking to one camera system so kids can swap lenses, share chargers, etc, and also be able to speak a common language when it comes to the operation and systems settings of the cameras.
Good on you for this project, it sounds like a great idea!
It sounds like the kind of project Oxfam would love; they’re likely to have the kind of contacts that can be useful for something like this.
Nikon itself chooses a charity to support each year. That support takes the form of money, but if you sell them the idea, they may be willing to provide something like second-qualities or prototypes for your kids, either for free or at employee price. A second-quality is an item which doesn’t pass quality due to a minor defect: it can be something such as a tiny scratch in the casing which you only see after someone points it out. In the case of prototypes they’d likely want feedback, even if they already got it from their own testers; the information from an experienced user and that you get from a newbie are very different.
Does it have to be a DSLR? My goodwill has an electronics section and they have boxes of those playing-card sized digital cameras by Canon and the like. You could get a lot of those kind of cameras for hardly any money.
One thing about the DSLR is that they are big and might be more likely to get stolen. The smaller camera would be easier to carry around without being noticed.
The DSLRs can be used professionally; they can mean careers for some of those kids. The point and clickers are likely to be worse than what people with a cellphone (those with the money to hire a photographer) already own.
Consider talking to the director of the orphanage to make sure it’s an appropriate gift. Although it would be a wonderful and thoughtful gift, the culture may make it problematic for him to have such a luxury.
In one of the past threads about poverty, someone related a story from when they were living in an impoverished nation and wanted to do something nice for the child of their maid. It was something like, they noticed that he needed shoes, so they bought him a nice, new pair. Later they noticed he never wore them, and when they asked, the maid said they were too nice and his friends would think he was trying to be better than them. (or something like that). Anyway, the point seemed to be that in some cultures, it could be offensive for one person to have such a nice thing if the others can’t share in it. It might actually work out better to give everyone a cheap camera rather than one person a nice camera.
I think the first thing to decide is how “big” you want to make this project. If you decide that this is a larger project, rather than a one off, this almost seems like something that could be organized through gofundme, or similar, once it’s a bit more fleshed out. I think some sort of charitable entity really needs to be set up as well, so you’re not on the hook for taxes for the donations, and so people can receive a write off (perhaps).
Like others, I have some older equipment that I could certainly donate.
Thank you for your replies everyone! I have been speaking to the orphanage and am awaiting feedback on what is most appropriate. Kigali is a fairly safe location and I think an entry level SLR will probably be safe for the older kids to use in appropriate circumstances but I will of course check.
I will look into KEH thanks for that. I will also investigate second-quality cameras. Great shout!
Not sure if it needs to be a big project. It’s a small orphanage with about 20 kids most of whom are very young. There are two or three older ones who might be interested in this. I could afford to spend $100 of my own money as long as it was something that was actually useful. Can’t find much at that price that I wouldn’t be suspicious of but maybe these suggestions will help. Thanks again!
Try to find a camera which can trivially transfer photos to the computer without anything proprietary. The easiest would probably be a camera which can be directly connected with a standard USB cord and shows up on the computer as an external drive without any special drivers being loaded. Some cameras have proprietary cords or require special drivers on the computer to upload photos, which could be problematic for them. Even transferring photos over using the flash card could be problematic if the laptop didn’t have a slot for the card. They may not have a way to get a flash card hooked up to the computer.