Lean Left

Comments (5)

• #1 by KTK at January 8th, 2009

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  Polaroids are way stupid as ordinary cameras, but who cares? They are to this day hugely popular among art-photography types. They have an iconic look, as to both format and image quality, and there are some clever things you can do with the print as it develops to get unique effects. There’s an entire genre of Polaroid art-photography and shooters dedicated to it; Polaroid even developed some special large-format and ultra-large format cameras for them. The digital thing seems kind of silly, but, anyway, it’s just not the same.

  I note this: “Polaroid stopped making film packs last year”. Wow. End of an era. I hand’t known that. It’s very sad.

• #2 by tgirsch at January 8th, 2009

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  I hadn’t known that, either, but my reaction was “I’m surprised they hadn’t done so much longer ago than that!”

  Even more depressing, word is that Kodak will stop manufacturing Kodachrome.

• #3 by Kevin T. Keith at January 8th, 2009

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  Yeah - the ‘chrome is a huge loss. It gives us those nice bright colors.

  Over on eBay, people are now bidding over $1.70 per shot for low-end Polaroid film in bulk paks. Eeesh.

  The whole film-photography industry is circling the drain. It will hang on as a specialty art for a long time - hell, there are photographers now who are still doing wet-plate photography and freakin’ Daguerrotypes; they’ll never miss film because they never got that far. But prices will go up, options will close down, cameras are already almost impossible to get fixed. And the real pisser is that it’s still much finer-grained than almost all digital images, and viscerally compelling in a way that digital never is.

  I have always been entranced by film photography. Even the best digital stuff just bores me. I think it’s because it’s too easy, and because there’s no actual original artwork. Every digital image is a copy, and there’s never a sense of the fragility and risk-taking that pervades one-of-a-kind, hand-made art. Those are very unsophisticated complaints, but that’s still how it strikes me.

• #4 by tgirsch at January 9th, 2009

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  Digital’s fine for the kind of photography most people used point-and-shoot cameras for, but you’re right, for the artsy stuff, it’s just not the same, especially in print form. A high-quality 100 speed film will still give image quality much superior to even today’s best digital cameras.

  But you’re right, digital is easy, and I finally, reluctantly, made the switch about a year and a half ago. More important than being easy, it’s sooooo much less expensive. The camera equipment itself costs more, but I’m not having to pay on the order of 40¢ per shot for processing any more. With my film camera, as of a couple of years ago, it cost me about 67¢ every time I pressed the shutter.

  So, yeah, the upside is nowhere near as good, but at least I’m not shooting myself into bankruptcy.

• #5 by digglahhh at January 9th, 2009

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  I actually think this might do well.

  Especially for the borderline technophobes who like the idea and ease of digital photography, but are intimidated and computer illiterate to the point that they don’t understand or are intimiated to learn to use things like ofoto or whatever. I bet that’s a bigger cross section of people than you might imagine. Plus, the Polaroid brand name is familiar to them and is associated with making easy solutions to the types of problems. If it’s reasonably priced, I bet it does well in the older demographics.

  Of course, I have no great history of predicting the success or failure of these things either.