As this year comes to an end and 2009 starts gloriously, photographers around the globe are mourning the loss our good friend Polaroid. With all but one Polaroid film being discontinued at the end of the current quarter (600 film is projected to be available for purchase until sometime during Q1 2009) the transition to digital has been sealed as far as instant film is concerned.
Hopefully someone will buy up the Polaroid facilities and continue to make the film in short runs for us fancy pants artists and the like. I have an old SX-70 Land Camera that I still need to fix (or just replace) and run around with.
If you’re a real Polaroid addict you can recreate the look of the photos, including the white border, with a Mac App called Poladroid (which already has quite a following on the interwebs). The photos are neat – and it definitely does a good job of recreating the look of the original – but some of the features are a little goofy. For instance, you can “shake” the image that it outputs to speed up “developing”. That’s funny, because, if I remember correctly, Polaroid once issued a statement that shaking their photos doesn’t actually do anything, other than occupy the bored photographer.
The photo for this post is a sample I “developed” – apparently greasy thumbprints are cool and artsy now? (it is an option – relax!).
(Polaroid Release and Poladroid Website)
[...] remember an earlier post here at Dembroriffic about the End of an Era – the Polaroid Era. At that time the only viable solution (that I knew about) to continue our [...]