Some lessons learned today. Instant film is pretty tricky to work with, unforgiving in fact. I finally got two images at 1 minute and 2 minutes where my 120 camera would have managed it in 6-12 seconds. Looks like 1:20 would have been about right, but that’s something I’ll figure out later as I work out the disposition of this camera.
Do I keep it close to it’s original configuration with the bellows? If I cut all that off and break it down to a Polaroid film holder with a pinhole, I can cut exposure times way down (as focal length decreases, you need less light, as the inverse square law states). There’s no compelling reason to keep it as it is, other than a trace of regret at taking what was a functional, if useless, camera and rendering it for parts.
The calculations here suggest it should work: with the shorter focal length, the exposure times are pretty manageable, even with instant film’s abysmal reciprocity characteristics.
On the real film front, things were OK. I wandered around the old Sand Point Naval Air Station, while a young cyclist worked up her confidence, and grabbed 4-5 images on color slide film. A beautiful day there today, some sailboats out, and some kind of intro to kayaking as well: you could walk up and take a sea kayak out. Colorful things, those. I’ll know this time tomorrow if any of that stuff came out.
I had some black and white subjects in mind but time and other commitments pushed them off the schedule. They’ll keep.
My stuff will go up here when I get it back from the processor. And a Flickr set will likely happen too.
Now playing: Last Boat Leaving by Elvis Costello from the album “Spike”
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