Walking with a Polaroid

11 July 2022 Leave a comment

My latest Idler column is about instant photography, with a comparison between Instax and Polaroid cameras. I frequently use both, and today I took a walk from Winchburgh to Linlithgow, with my OneStep2. This is a modern recreation of the 1970s OneStep camera, looking fairly similar but featuring built-in flash, and able to use cheaper i-Type films due to having a rechargeable battery built in to it. It should, in theory, take better photos than the older ones, but I’ve had frustratingly inconsistent results out of it. Sometimes I’m tempted to sell it, other times I love it.

I’m not sure if it’s the camera, the film or a combination of both, but the exposure seems to be all over the place on this thing. It has a tendency to badly underexpose things, which has never been a problem with my early-80s “Button” camera, which takes SX-70 film (although can also take 600 film, with a few tricks to fool it). Anyway, here’s a few shots from today, a couple of which have worked, and a couple of which haven’t.

These thistles, with the wheat field in the background, really caught my eye. I’m pleased with how the camera has rendered the colours, and thankfully the focus is OK – you can’t control it on this camera. Exposure is good too. I’m a big fan of the black frames films, I’ve shot a few of them.

Shot across a wheat field. I was half-expecting to see Theresa May running through it, but thankfully I didn’t. 🙂 I just really liked the colours here, and the warm tint the camera has given the sky.

A bush with some blue berries on it, that I’m pretty certain aren’t blueberries. Anyway, excuse my poor plant identification skills. Poorer exposure and bit of a lack of detail here, despite using flash.

This one disappointed me. It was actually a brightly-lit scene, and the lightning tree really dramatically dominated it. The exposure is all wrong, and the viewfinder isn’t very accurate. That tree should be in a much more prominent position. Oh well, some you win, some you lose.

Success with this thing is attempting to work out what will look good before you shoot it, but boy, is it hard to tell. Polaroid photos are very far from cheap, so any less impressive ones are bit of a waste of money. I’m happy with two out of the four, though. Maybe one day my success rate will be a little higher!

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