You know those stories of someone paying $10 for a lost Picasso or Rembrandt at a thrift market. You may think “that’s nice, but it couldn’t happen to me.” Well, ten years ago, Rick Norsigian of Fresno California paid $45 for a group of glass photographic negatives wrapped in newspapers from the 1940s that were made by Ansel Adams and they could be worth as much as $200 million dollars.

The painter was looking through boxes at a garage sale when he found the 65 glass negatives, but he never imagined they were made by the legendary lensman. A team of experts say the photos were taken in Yosemite National Park and in San Francisco, likely between 1919 and the early 1930s, and were thought to have been lost in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5000 glass negatives.