Tag Archives: instant gratification

Now for something completely different, a Polaroid Film

Every day, my iPhone comes out of my pocket for a minimum of a dozen photos. Generally, many dozen images, are captured and played with with enhancement apps. The modern smartphone allows a person to take a lot of photos with near zero expense. By taking a lot of snaps of things all around, a person can learn how to judge what they see vs what will result in a photo taken. Not quite like taking photos with film. Film is pay-to-use, the roll has to be purchased, developed and printed. Which means developing photo techniques take a while. Polaroid offered a lot less of a lag between shooting and seeing a resulting image. Though, the cost of each of the instant gratification photos is considerably more.

I have mentioned before that I shoot with just about everything, all types of film in cameras across many years, for fun and profit. Last weekend was 620 and 127 films though cameras older than my dad. This weekend was a Polaroid 320 and Spectra.

Today I had a fun find, a full length movie about the last year of Polaroid. From the preview, it appears to cover the factory closure, photographers and the gent (team) that took over the equipment to produce The Impossible Project instant film. Time Zero is doing the festival rounds, with your own copy available for pre-order through iTunes. I’ll toss up a review when the movie shows up for viewing.
time zero polaroid

Vintage Polaroid Cameras And Film In The Days Of The iPhone

I am a collector of vintage cameras. No particular year or style, the cameras in my collection are only limited by my interest in the particular tech. When it is possible to locate film that will work, I actually take some out of the collection to shoot with. The fun of film is the planning and non-instant-gratification. For those times that I want to mix vintage with a instant view of my shots, I break out one of my Polaroids. Initially, this meant using expired film, then Impossible Project started producing Polaroid style film, but it had exposure issues (well, I had problems, others where happier). Recently, Impossible Project has added a coating to their film making the final results much better.

A few of my shooters –

01 Polaroid

02 Polaroid

Results vary, but when Luna will sit still long enough, she loves when the camera comes out –

03 PolaroidOf course, there is an app for that too. Not just one Instant Polaroid effect iPhone app, but many many… many. Most are just ‘frames’ apps to wrap a photo in a Polaroid trademarked paper frame. Instant – The Polaroid Instant Camera is an app that I tend to play with when I want to add the realistic vintage effect when shooting with my iPhone.

04 Instant Polaroid

Along with the exposure/film type, Instant lets you add all of the particulars that make the photo deliver the message your looking for. Color the frame ‘paper’, and add wear via blotches, wrinkles and even finger prints. Then a bit of handwriting text for a final touch.

05 Instant Polaroid

If the fun of vintage film photography is something you enjoy, narrowed down to Polaroid particularly, you may enjoy Polanoid.net . A site that has Polaroid camera users all over the world submitting their snapshots for you to enjoy.

06 Polaroid dot net

The Polanoid.net site has what seems like an endless list of Polaroid film captures. The images are grouped by camera type as well as photographer. Fun to see new and old photos and the creative work people do with instant photography.

07 Polaroid dot net