Mission Impossible...

A few weeks ago I saw an old Polaroid 600 camera for sale in a charity shop...for £4. I bought it...well I couldn't resist. I had a vague notion that Polaroid had stopped producing film for it but I reckoned that somewhere somehow I'd obtain a pack. OMG the out of date stuff sells for mega-bucks on ebay so I kind of shelved that idea.

Then I spotted an article on a photography blog I follow. It was talking about The Impossible Project. Basically a group of people rescued the last Polaroid factory in Enschede, in Holland and set about making a new Polaroid film. They gave themselves the target of 1 year to come up with the goods and pretty much managed it with a few caveats which are:

The film is still fairly experimental and therefore unstable and unpredictable. It's a tad expensive ...though not as expensive as out of date film on ebay!

Anyway I like a challenge, so ordered some of the film and today it arrived.

The first couple of shots were a bit pale and washed out but the film very definitely worked. I can't turn the flash off on the model I have so I tried taping bin liner plastic over it...now I could use more strongly directional illumination and this was the third shot. Henry in Polaroid magnificence.

Ok...this is not going to replace my digital camera but I'll think of it like expensive spice...nice to use occasionally to add a bit of variety to my shots. The signs are also good that I'll be able to manipulate the images manually and produce pretty good arty effects.

In a secondhand book shop I also bought a book about toy cameras and their artistic heritage and one about film cameras (my dad gave me an old film SLR last year) so I might have a bit more experimenting to do yet.

Edit: Blip actually suspended the first scan I uploaded because it had a border...Well that wasn't actually an artistic choice... Polaroids have borders and they look somewhat less authentic without them I feel. However, good little girl that I am, I have removed my lovely, genuine, hard-earned Polaroid border <sob> and just offer to you the image with my apologies :-)