Instant Film Photography
I took one of my favorite pictures of my wife in late 1998, early 1999. She was pregnant with our daughter but still a few months away from the birth date, and I took a photo with a Polaroid camera. She looks a bit pale and tired but happy in her green nightgown. The picture is slightly faded by now. Not that it was saturated back then.
The camera was one of the simpler models. I believe it was bought by my parents at some point in the 1980s, but I could be completely wrong. I don’t even remember when it ended up in our household. When I dug out the picture to scan it, I noticed that it was a square picture on square paper, meaning that it was one films where you had to peel off some protective paper after taking the shot.
Now, apart from that particular photo, I have never been a big fan of Polaroids. The image quality was mostly appalling and washed out and nowhere close to that of the pictures I had taken with my 35mm cameras or even my pocket camera.
For sure, the fact that you could have instant pictures of your memories, your loved ones or your models was appealing. But the high end Polaroid cameras were unaffordable for me; not to even mention the Polaroids that you could shoot on medium or large format cameras with dedicated backs.
When the digital cameras took over, the instant camera market seemed to crumble and seemed to be dead with the advent of smart phones. Even notable and long-time Polaroid photographers like Patti Smith had to switch to a smart phone as Polaroid had ceased to produce films for her beloved Polaroid Land Camera. By 2008, Polaroid had stopped the production of instant films altogether.
In a parallel development, Fujifilm started to produce a new line of instant photography products in 1998, the Instax cameras that today come in three different film formats. In response also to Fujifilm’s success among younger people, a company that had acquired the Polaroid brand and patents started to produce cameras and films again in 2017, this time in the Netherlands. The backstory of the new Polaroid company (the original company had filed for bankruptcy in 2001).
When my daughter turned 15 or 16, she put an Instax camera on her wishlist. Instax by then had two different film formats in its line-up: Instax Mini and Instax Wide. The Instax Square format that mimicked Polaroid’s well-known and widespread consumer square format only came out later, in 2017. We bought an Instax Mini for our daughter. The Instax cameras were available in multiple colour schemes quite obviously targeted at my daughter’s age. She went with a model in an indescript light green - like a light version of the Bianchi bycicles’ “menta” colour.
When I recently asked her to lend the camera to me for this article she complained how badly this camera sucks in no unclear terms (“die ist scheisse”) and that she never got any good pictures with it. She also noted that there is still some film left in the camera and that it is likely black & white because the colour films were worse. So after cleaning the battery compartment and put in new batteries, the camera was back in working order. And since my daughter was still in room, I took a photo of her, of course using a flash. The framing of the photo was a bit off but otherwise it looked better than expected.
But this is not how the idea for this article started. At some point over the past couple of years, I have started to like the vintage look of Polaroids and other instant photos. And while browsing for ideas last winter, I stumbled across some articles on more modern instant cameras, printers using Instax films. While researching the costs of films I also came across instant cameras by other brands that used the Fujifilm Instax films: Lomography had a couple of models, but then there was also the small brand MiNT that seemingly produces high-end cameras for the Instax formats or revamps old Polaroid SX-70 cameras to work with modern Polaroid films.
I quite like the wide Instax format, so I bought both a printer and a camera. Not a Fujifilm camera but rather a Lomography for the wide format. As a macro photographer, how could I resist a camera for which there was a close-up lens included in the kit? Like the Fujifilm cameras, this one had a plastic lens as well, but it also offered some settings for double exposures, flash on/off and even some exposure compensation settings, all accessible with dials and buttons at the back of the camera. And it was black.
I had fancied one of the MiNT cameras, but at the cost of about a thousand Euros they seemed to be too expensive. I still do like them, but looking at images that owners (or reviews) of that camera produced, I thought it is not worth it (yet). Meanwhile I have come across yet another niche producer of instant cameras that use Instax films: Nons Camera that produces interchangeable lens instant cameras in an SLR format, which sounds interesting at first but seems to need some further improvements.
As any article about instant film photography would be incomplete without having at least one Polaroid camera in the mix, I went on to buy their Polaroid Now+ model which has some interesting features such as remote manual control via a smartphone app etc. Polaroid currently offers the classical square format models (the pictures are a bit larger than the Instax Square ones) and some format that competes with the Instax Mini format. The exterior design of the Now+ very much resembles the one that I had photograph my pregnant wife with. My camera is black, of course, and sports a rainbow stripe below the lens but there are other colours available, too. I have to say that Polaroid’s new colour schemes are much more agreeable than the Fujifilm Instax schemes. Lomography cameras come in second in my personal beauty contest.
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Now that I have my test equipment lined up, the big question will be how many pictures I will have to take until I am able to produce somewhat useable results with each of the cameras. This is also a cost question as Instant films are by no means cheap. Each photo with an Instax film costs about 1 Euro / Dollar / Pound Sterling. Polaroid film is even more expensive, coming in at about 2 Euros / Dollars / Pound Sterling.
Let’s start with some thoughts on the Lomo’instant Wide, since I have had this camera for a while now. On paper, this camera may the best of them all because of the possibility to manually adjust the exposure, switch of the flash, go for multiple exposures easily etc. It also comes with a couple of handy accessories. A lens cap that acts as remote control. Another lens cap called Splitzer, which allows for multiple exposures while parts of the image are covered. A wide angle lens adapter and a separate rangefinder insert for that lens. And a macro diopter which allows for close-up macros. The camera is built plasticky, the film compartment rattles slidely but otherwise is built well. Ergonomics are also OK.
On the front side of the camera, the 90mm (equiv. 35mm full frame) f/8 lens protrudes quite a bit. It can be twisted for 3 focus zones - 0.6m, 1-2m and infinity. Also, and that is something unique among the group of instant cameras I am looking at in this post, it has a 49mm filter thread. So, theoretically, you could slap on an ND filter for long exposures, or a glitter glas filter for even more pronounced blooming effects.
The first round of pictures I took with this camera back in spring produced, well, mixed results. Out of the four pictures below, only one was exposed OK-ish, the others struggled with the highlights. But I have to admit that they do have character. And the lens flares are great. The colours of these was good as well, but then they were shot during the golden hour, which certainly helped.
When using the Lomo’Instant (and the other instant film cameras) recently, I’ve noticed how much I really struggled with the exposure of instant film. The built-in light meter is struggling with high-contrast subjects badly, which is quite a shame. But it would be unfair to blame it all on the camera. I believe, but am not so sure, that I have set the exposure compensation on some of the shots on -1. While most of the pictures have some special charm, especially the yellow flower, they also look pretty gloomy.
When the Polaroid camera arrived, I quite liked the idea of going forward with this one. It was a Polaroid Now+ model, which allows for a variety of setting adjustments to be made through the Polaroid smartphone app. Although I am not the biggest fan of hardware that depends on smartphone controls (not in photography, or, say, in synthesizers), I thought the external app would increase my chances to shoot a real good instant photo.
So, on paper, the Now+ seemed to be a good addition to the Lomo’Instat Wide. It even has an autofocus rather than a zone focus that should ensure you get in-focus pictures. That’s what I thought, but so far, I am pretty disappointed.
In oder to understand what the camera’s baseline operation is like, I shot a number of selfies, both with and without flash, with and without exposure compensation set through the app. By and large, I’d say that most pictures bar one are overexposed, with blown out highlights. Oddly, though, one of the pictures that I took with the flash set to on came out correctly exposed (but I make too embarrassing a face to show it off here).
One of the cool features of the Lomo’Instant and the Polaroid cameras is the double exposure function, so I’ve incluced one example here. Overexposed, yes, but still interesting enough. Some photos in the garden also remained inconclusive, with the one top right feeling alright whereas the other two are off - the left one of the lupines out of focus and exposed badly, the right one of the sun hats blown out in the highlights.
This makes me wonder what the exposure latitude of instant films is like. It does seem quite narrow, at least compared to modern digital cameras that boast about 15 stops of dynamic range. Color negative films can usually be overexposed by up to three stops without bigger issues. I found some information that the Fujifilm Instax films have about half the dynamic range of the digital cameras (which is hard to believe for me, if I’m honest).
So I ended up experimenting with the Polaroid, while having in mind that the time to send the camera back to Amazon was to end soon. With a colour film in the camera I went up to our terrace where we try to grow some vegetables. The results were, again, very mixed and nowhere near as consistent as I would love to have them.
I leave it to the readers of this blog to decide if any of the photos is exposed correctly or near correctly. For me, if at all, the top left and bottom right come closest, but even then, I don’t remember which settings let to which results (maybe I should have started taking notes on the pictures with permanent marker.
Still, I have to say that I began to bear quite a grudge that I’d purchased the Polaroid in the first place. I don’t mind taking blurry pictures that are wrongly exposed, as long as it is me who decides. That’s part of the creative journey I connect with photography. But if the camera consistently fails to impress me or to show its own will, then it is time to say goodbye.
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The last camera I want to write here is the Fujifilm Instax Mini. Apart from that initial picture I took of my daughter, I haven’t had the chance to test it further as my salary-earning job took over much of my time. I may need to come back to write about it in a separate article.
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A final note on how I digitalized the instant photos. I found that the easiest way to do it for this article was to scan them at 600 dpi on my HP office scanner. It’s not ideal, and the scanning software is not really great. Theoretically, the scanner also allows for higher resolution scans at 1200 dpi, but that usually causes the software to either crash or just don’t scan. I have done fairly little in post. Occasionally I had to increase the brightness of the pictures so that the borders of the instant photos became white.