It seems, the polaroid instant pictures are very close to the nowadays point and shoot digital cameras but for me – they are not! Polaroid was not only chosen by tourist photographers that had a possibility to sell their souvenir at the spot but for two other interesting reasons.
One important role of the polaroid was in combination with a middle format studio camera like the MAMIYA RZ67 to check the setting of the light. Photographers used flashes that days because lamps of that required light strength would heat up the studio too much and stress the electricity bill. So before taking the picture with the standard film, they changed the film container on the back of the camera to polaroid and took a shot to see, if the flashes were producing the right shadows…
Another interesting role of the polaroids was the authenticity. With standard film and the second development process in the darkroom, a lot of possibilities existed to “correct” the resulting pictures. The old school photoshopping… Therefore agencies sometimes preferred models to just bring some polaroids instead of high glossy brochures because they just trusted the polaroid.
There is the big difference between digital and polaroid. You receive your result almost immediately but the polaroid stays. While the digital image changes by getting compressed, cropped, more compressed, changed and so on – the polaroid stays (except, you forget it in the sun or similar).
Since I received two new films yesterday, I had to try out the polaroid back of my Mamiya. So I took a picture of a friend of mine who’s birthday is today. So Happy Birthday Mr. Stan4ika!
The two new films are the the flat and less grainy Bergger Pancro 400 and the Fujifilm FP-100C.