Tag Archives: Polaroid film

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

It’s family holiday time, grab the Polaroid camera

Dad was an electrical engineer so we had the latest tech toys. A SX70 Polaroid fit right in, much more fun at the time than my 126 cartridge camera. Film and Flash bars were not cheap so we weren’t allowed to shoot a picture of every little thing. What really helped was the fun of the film coming out of the camera and watching the grey area of the card slowly become a ‘developed’ picture. Shaking helped the development process, speeding things up a bit as well making the color more even.

Snapping a photo with ShakeItPhoto will result in the classic film card slide onto the screen. I figured the kids I showed it to wouldn’t understand since they had never used a Polaroid camera… nah, they thought it was fun too.

It’s hard to resist not shaking the iPhone as the image starts to appear…

When the image is done, a copy of the Polaroid effect image is saved to your iPhone photo library. I found this didn’t start happening till after I restarted the iPhone. ShakeItPhoto also lets you import a image from your Photo Library to apply the effect to. ‘Sharing’ via email attachment or Facebook is available.

Options are light for ShakeItPhoto. ‘Polaroid’ is a square vs classic picture frame, Fast Processing just ‘develops’ quicker… less time to shake, Keep Original is the image without the Polaroid effect/frame.