Driving around is how I pay the bills.  I’m a transporter for a community mental health agency.  A good amount of my job is making sure that people who receive services from us get where they need to go, so long as it is clinicly significant (i.e. doctor appointments, grocery shopping, etc.).  This puts me all over the county several days a week.  I usually bring at least three cameras with me including my cell phone.  One camera that I rarely leave home without is my polaroid. 

I don’t even know where to begin with this camera.  It is transcendent, or as close to perfect as a camera can be.  It’s not just because of its charming collapsible boxiness and incredibly blinding flash, it’s because the pictures it takes are the epitome of the snapshot.  The pictures are never true to life and do not totally represent what we “see.”  Areas get blown out that shouldn’t be, the chemistry doesn’t always get spread evenly, they don’t even attempt to correct the parallax, and my favorite – the colors are often horridly wonderful.

Many wouldn’t and don’t consider this a lo-fi camera.  That’s absurd.  I have taken half a dozen of these things apart and they are not complex, although there is some circuitry in some models (gasp).  But come on, the battery is contained in the package of film.  Oh well, we can argue about which qualifying factors it does and doesn’t have forever, so let’s just agree that they take great photos.  Here are a few more of recent (last 30 days) polaroids.

I’ve only got six more packs of 600 film left.  The local Walmart may carry it for a few more weeks, so I’ll probably have pick up a few more packages.  After that it’s ebay, at least until the Impossible Project begins manufacturing and distributing their spin on instant films.

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Tags: Holga, lego, Lego Robot, lo-fi camera, Pictures, polaroid, polaroid 600

This entry was posted on 3 March 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Sean's Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.