Polaroid past and present

I haven’t posted anything about photography lately 🙂

I was clearing a loft the other day and came across an instruction manual for an old Polaroid Land camera, which I can only assume my father owned at some point (his writing is on the back page, I’m guessing maybe he was costing out a kit purchase!). I thought I’d scan it in for posterity.

As a child in the late 70s and 80s, I used to love Polaroids, even as the format was in decline with the widespread rise of 35mm combined with Supasnaps for processing. As we know, Polaroid have stopped making film now so it’s hard to actually find people using them, although I was captured on Polaroid at a Flickr party in London a while ago.

So what are the options? Well, nothing really gets close to the original pleasure of having a photo pop out of the camera and then the image appearing as it dried. However, there’s a nice piece of software called Poladroid which attempts to replicate the look and feel of the images themselves (down to the texture of the paper, and the slow drying film!).

That’s still not good enough really, of course… it looks good but it’s not the same. Polaroid have announced that they will combine their PoGo mobile printer with Zink technology with a digital camera this year, although that will be starting off with a low pixel count sensor, and the Zink paper at the moment is fairly small… but I see it as a promising step in the right direction to bringing back a more fun, tactile photography.