(8 🧵) Finally the meetup. I was planning an holiday in Italy and the guy didn't live too far. We met in a cafe and I handed over the negatives to him. He was very happy, some pictures were almost 25 years old!

(🧵 7) Some more googling and a bit of courage brought me to an email address from the national institute of geophysics in Italy. I wrote to the guy and waited... and few hours later, a reply. It was his camera! And some of those pictures where from an arctic expedition conducted in the late 90s

(🧵 6) When I finally looked at the pictures, the first roll was almost unrecoverable, only some shadows in the dark. But the second one.. was almost perfect and one person among the pictures ressambled the guy I found on LinkedIn! Here is one of the pictures.. is that a 1st gen iPhone?

(🧵 5) That's it, I was hooked! I needed to find out what happened there and to whom those photos belonged. I sent everything to develop... but I was slightly worried about the content I might have found.. So I asked not to print them and did the scanning myself.

(🧵 4) But most importantly I found two undeveloped rolls and an unexposed roll with expiry date 1993!

(🧵 3) Among the paperwork... I found a list of phone numbers.. this time in German. Among them, a single Italian name! A stroke of luck! Some googling put me on track of a geophysic professional with the same name on LinkedIn.

(🧵 2) The camera came with its original carry bag, also well kept. But this is where things got interesting... Inside the bag I found all the original documents and manual...in Italian!

In this 🧵(1/8) I will tell you the bizarre story that brought me from buying an old camera in the UK to reunite a man with his long lost photos from 25 years ago in Italy It all started when I purchased this very well kept Nikon F60 last june on eBay as a birthday gift #filmphotography#story

<username> was not in the sudoers file. This incident has been reported to Santa, who has added you to the naughty list

I hope he gives them the finger at this point