Thursday 7 April 2011

Project Polaroid Aborted


One of my initial ideas was to take photographs using a Polaroid film and a Polaroid camera. I bought myself a Polaroid camera, however authentic Polaroid film is near enough unattainable. What I did however manage to attain was film by The Impossible Project, which has been creating film as a replacement for the original Polaroid. Below is a photograph of the film I bought.

PX600 Silver Shade Monochrome


The cost of The Impossible Project film is set at exorbitant prices and for that fact I settled for Monochrome because it was the cheapest of the excessively priced. Perhaps I should have stopped there really, but I didn’t, instead I bought the film and I bought the camera thinking I had came up with some sort of sensational idea and it was all going to be worth it. As one may already apprehend, if attention was paid to the title, I hadn’t. In fact the whole Polaroid project was terrible; Let me begin divulging as to why. To start with, when putting the film into the camera, one of the Polaroid frames immediately spat out, wasting one of my precious eight. Now let’s remember the film is very expensive – it was an antagonizing couple of seconds. Secondly, the whole idea of the project was for me to prance around taking snap shots, impromptly pressing down the shutter button at random moments, resulting in spontaneous, yet meaningful snap shots. On the contrary however, because each frame cost so much money and they came in packs of just eight, I was being way to cautious (cautious/penurious/economical - take your pick) and not snapping away as planned. Thirdly, the results were atrocious and I hated them.




Above are two images I took using the Polaroid camera. I imagine I may have kept the first one under my arm for too little time and the second one perhaps for too long, maybe this is something which improves with practise; maybe I’m just incompetent, I don’t know. However I do know the results were not to my liking. The photographs are too unclear, and too brown, I wasn’t expecting brown. The bottom photograph immediately had markings and splodges on it which didn’t look great. I mentioned the results to Adam (the teacher), he proposed that it might be The Impossible Project’s film which might not be very good, perhaps or perhaps he was just being encouraging. He then suggested buying the Fuji film which peels apart. This meant I needed to buy more film and a different kind of camera and I thought about it for a while. The thought escaped my mind when I intended on using up the rest of the film (seeing as I bought it) however when I went to use the camera again it wouldn’t work. I imagine it has a battery I’m meant to turn on and off and I didn’t realise and must have left it on. At the risk of sounding like a complete idiot, I’ll be honest here and say I haven’t got the slightest clue. I basically lost interest in the whole Polaroid project, resulting in a failed experiment.

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