dreams in analog
Yesterday evening, I found myself staring at a polaroid print inches from my bespectacled face and marveling at the resolution as if in search of pixels or digital compression-algorithmic noise. It is perhaps a good time to step away from the Photoshop.
This marveling was enabled by the newest old camera in my collection, a Polaroid "CoolCam 600" in red and black, picked up at a thrift store for $10 rather than the $50 or so it retails for online. There is a tiny niche market for those of us with a love for clunky analog processes and instant gratification; today there are two companies making new film packs for these long-since-discontinued toys. And while the new film seems pricey, it's not so bad when you add up the price of getting normal colour film developed, or the price of any digital camera at all. But most importantly to me, every single old Polaroid camera winds up being broken a little bit differently, leaving trails behind in the print rollers, distorting the colours in a unique way. I am rather enamored of this one, and I am looking forward to scanning what comes out of it at 1200dpi or so, which basically means blow the pictures up as big as I damn well please because, well, this sort of analog resolution's value is "yes", and therefore I can.
(New:clicky for the big scan)
This marveling was enabled by the newest old camera in my collection, a Polaroid "CoolCam 600" in red and black, picked up at a thrift store for $10 rather than the $50 or so it retails for online. There is a tiny niche market for those of us with a love for clunky analog processes and instant gratification; today there are two companies making new film packs for these long-since-discontinued toys. And while the new film seems pricey, it's not so bad when you add up the price of getting normal colour film developed, or the price of any digital camera at all. But most importantly to me, every single old Polaroid camera winds up being broken a little bit differently, leaving trails behind in the print rollers, distorting the colours in a unique way. I am rather enamored of this one, and I am looking forward to scanning what comes out of it at 1200dpi or so, which basically means blow the pictures up as big as I damn well please because, well, this sort of analog resolution's value is "yes", and therefore I can.
(New:clicky for the big scan)