Polaroid / Taking Annoyingly Challenging Photos Just To Feel Something (Patreon)

Hello!

Slightly different topic today: instant photography. I've used a Fuji Instax SQ1 for a couple of years now, and I really do enjoy the process and art of taking instant photos. In our home, we have two giant bulletin boards (plus a variety of shadowboxes) up that are filled with instant photos taken of us and our friends since we moved to Seattle. They're some of my favorite possessions, and they serve as a perfect example of the "film-as-life-record" aspect of physical media I enjoy so dearly.

Instax film itself is phenomenal, too. Unfortunately, the SQ1 camera is a wretched plastic square that I genuinely hate shooting with. It has one button (shutter), it feels cheap as all get-out, it has the world's crappiest plastic lens, there's no flash on/off setting, etc. It's basically random chance as to whether you get a good photo or not. As a result, I've wanted to try using a better instant camera for ages.

Enter this: The Polaroid OneStep+, which a friend of mine has indefinitely loaned me. This is a vastly superior camera to the Instax SQ1 in both build quality and features. It has two lenses, flash on/off, and +/- 1EV exposure comp on the body; Bluetooth and a phone allows for full manual control (including multiple exposures, flash power, etc.)

Modern Polaroid film color film sucks and it's wildly inconsistent, much worse than Instax film; the black-and-white Polaroid is much closer to good (albeit still not great). So I bought two packs of b/w (which, holy shit, it's expensive; this will be one of my only experiments for a little while) and got to shooting, using Antigone as the model. This first shot is a 1-second exposure taken on a tripod, no flash, just using a modelling lamp.

The real challenge, though, was that I wanted to take a full studio-style shot with off-camera strobe for non-frontal lighting. The strobe is a 750W Photogenic Powerlight I borrowed for a friend and I've had sitting around for a while; as the Polaroid doesn't have a PC sync port, I would need to use the Polaroid's flash at minimum strength as a master (mistress? domme?) to trigger the 750W strobe as a submissive.

It took me quite a while using my DSLR flash to determine exactly where the submissive photocell trigger was on the Photogenic, but once I had it figured out, I started taking Polaroids.

Polaroid has significantly less latitude than slide film, and trying to meter using my digital camera was almost useless - digital has too much dynamic range to accurately estimate what will blow out, and what will be entirely in shade. (This photo taken with identical settings on my DSLR looked perfectly lit.)

I moved back the strobe for wider light spread, stopped all the way down, and tried again. I should have upped it by more than a stop at a time, but the film blows out so easily, I was worried I'd overshoot. Plus, this way now I have a relatively handy guide at what, exactly, 1, 2, and 3 stops of underexposure look like on this stuff, which is actually helpful for the future.

I did, eventually, nail it. It was a silly amount of work for a single Polaroid, but I accomplished taking up an evening with an intensely fidgety hobby and learned a decent amount. Plus I got a good photo of my wife! What else could I really want?

Hope you enjoyed. I got more film rolls back so next post, I'll have a more typical update.

Vicki