I clearly don’t remember how I got into Polaroids, but I first found out about it through Youtube. While my wife had Fujifilm Instax before I was doing photography, I never felt like having one of my own, which I believe mainly could be due to the size of the photos. In terms to media consumption I am a big fan of large devices, I would try to have biggest laptop/TV/mobile phone I can so that I can look at things on a biggest possible device.
When I try to think, it seems I may have come across Polaroid photography during my film photography learning days. What I remember clearly was being awestruck by the design of Polaroid SX-70. As a fan of well designed things, that camera immediately caught my attention and never left it! I mean that thing still looks futuristic and hasn’t been replicated or bettered yet!
After learning about it I found out it’s print size is quite big as well which was a big positive. Then, began the search for SX-70 around my local 2nd hand markets as prices of them on ebay were stupendous. After few months of looking around one SX-70 popped up for a decent price and I immediately bought it. As the film for it was very expensive it was another good exercise in finding compositions before clicking the shutter button. After photographing few shots it sadly malfunctioned, but as I bought it from 2nd hand shop I had the warranty and I got my money back due to camera was probably going to cost them more to repair than what I paid for.
At the same time I had planned a trip to visit my family in India, and I wanted to carry a polaroid with me badly just so that I could bring back some memories in physical prints with me. Luckily I found an old Polaroid 1000 land camera at a very cheap price. Now to take photos with that was a bit different than SX-70 as the later had manual focus and a glass lens so photos were much sharper from SX-70. And as the speed of newer film (160 ISO) is a bit higher than what the cameras were made for (100 ISO) I knew I had to dial down exposure compensation a bit. It took me few over exposed photos to figure out the right setting. During my trip to India I got a few good memories captured with it, especially the city where I grew up -Jamnagar has this iconic Lakhota Lake where I had spent a lot of evenings with my friends and some others photos of my sister and my nephew.
All this time looking at videos of Polaroid and learning when to photograph for best results, I came to know about their black and white film and I was eager to try it. Polaroid is mainly known for its colours but I was curious to see what kind of results I would get with bnw film. As I only had Polaroid 1000 camera I couldn’t do very close up shots, but I shot few different things like indoor plants, tools in my backyard but my favourite shot was of the light and shadows on the fence. Whenever I used to look at light falling on the fence through my window I knew I what kind of photo I wanted to take, I just had to wait for the right time of the day so the shadows were the way I liked.
Shortly after I was done with my last pack of film, Polaroid announced a new camera – Polaroid Now. It had some good features like auto-focus, built in flash, double exposure and I also liked its design. You’ve got to support the things you love, so I had to buy this camera. This I believe you should do for the things you are passionate about, your money spent towards your hobby would let the industry know about the amount of interest there is for their product be it photography, hiking, cars, rock climbing or anything else. Considering Polaroid being at where it is right now solely depends on few avid fans who managed to salvage it first as Impossible Project and then managed to revive it to where it is now, I had to do my part and buy their latest offering.
I just didn’t buy it because it was new, but I liked all the things they did with this and price wise it was cheaper than previous Polaroid one cameras. Having this camera also meant I could buy much cheaper iType film due to this camera having an inbuilt battery.
For the first outing I took the camera to my local garden, not only as the lockdown was still on in Melbourne and I could only travel within 5kms from my house but also it was spring, so the flowers were fully bloomed. My immediate impressions with the results of this camera were that the photos were much more sharper and exposures were quite a bit better. But that could be due to the new iType film as well.
As I had only shot with SX-70 film before, I had never managed a photo with sky showing nice blue colour before but this could also be due to me shooting very limited packs of film. So it was quite good to be getting photos with blue sky. I was always admirer of beautiful clouds and sunset/sunrise colours. Once sitting in my backyard I noticed some beautiful white clouds and shot a test frame,and it turned out very beautiful to my surprise.
Since finding out the exposures of sky were coming out really nicely, I shot a sunset, curious to see how it would result in. And it didn’t disappoint at all! Which led me to pull out the Polaroid Now every time I was home and a decent sunset was unfolding. Some of the shots came out a bit blurry due to shooting handheld but I still liked them due to all the colours they produced.
While I was very happy with Polaroid Now I missed the manual focus and closed focus distance of SX-70, so every now and then I looked in our local buy and sell app Gumtree to see whether any SX-70 has popped up for a reasonable price. One day out of the blue I checked the app and found an SX-70 Sonar model for sale within 5km from my house! And after looking at the actual camera I ended up buying it, the owner had it sitting unused for decades. It still had old film pack where we used to get 10 films albeit it was dried and unusable but a decent memorabilia for my future camera shelf. The camera also came with flash-bar, vintage bag and to my surprise a self timer!
At the time there were no colour sx-70 film available for a reasonable price so I bought an black and while pack instead. And on a dark cloudy day I gave it a go and I was very happy with the end result. The contrast of the bnw film and sharpness of SX-70 made for perfect combination.
For the next photos; I wanted to photograph my coffee mug on our shelf where the sunlight hits nicely just few minutes before sunset. But as it hits at an angle due to the position of the window, I was trying to find the1 best composition, this will sound a bit repetitive but when you have limited shots and it costs money you’ll really think about your composition before pressing the shutter. After playing around with few different possibilities, I went with shooting the shadow of the mug instead. Due to the film being bnw I thought it would look nice and it did. Then, I ended up photographing similar shot of my Mandalorian funko.
Next came the cat! It was a gamble to take photos of her indoors as she’s never still, but on one occasion when she stood on the same window I mentioned earlier I took a backlit shot hoping it would turn out OK. On another occasion she was sleeping in her bed where the light was hitting nicely so I took the advantage of the situation and snapped a pic. Both of these turned out way better than I expected.
I also tried photographing her with flash on Polaroid Now, with that I learnt that I can’t go super low as the flash would only hit the foreground.
Recently my wife had bought an analogue calendar, so I had an idea of photographing a date which any automatic digtial calendars won’t show, just as an quirky way of showing the aim is not to be perfect with your art but to be experimental, make mistakes and embrace the happy accidents. And to show, with analogue you can have control, like on a manual car you can change the gear a bit later/earlier if you prefer while on an automatic that wont be an option as it will always work on to achieve the perfectly timed gear change.
Anyone familiar with Polaroid would tell you that it loves warm weather, which I realised when I tried shooting it on a cold Autumn morning. The photo didn’t quite actually came out as I expected but I still liked the end results.
Speaking of warm weather, I tool some photos during our recent trip to Cairns where it was hot and humid. And the photos turned our warmer too. They didn’t quite show the blue of the sky like in the photo I shot in my backyard.
Along this time I tried shooting them in different conditions, both indoors and outdoors just to see what kind of results I get. As I believe with Polaroid best way to learn is through experimenting first and getting to know what kind of results you get under different conditions and then adjusting your exposures if required.
The next in line for me is to grab the mint flash bar and some ND filters so I can shoot 600 film in my SX-70. I have some ideas for both colour and bnw projects.
If you have any tips to share please feel free to comment, and if you have read it through let me know which one is your favourite photo.