The sweet bliss of getting a sharp image, and two new cameras to play with

I'm still learning how to take photographs with my new SX-70. It's not as easy and straightforward as with the later autofocus cameras, and every photo that turns out properly focused and sharp just makes me insanely happy. Because you have so much less control of the outcome than with a digital camera, getting it right is somehow so much more satisfying.

Yes, I admit, I might be getting a bit obsessed with these old instant cameras. I just bought another not one, but two cameras. Well, they came as package of two, looked good and were reasonably priced. One's a Polaroid Image System, the other a Polaroid Image Pro. They're quite similar but the Pro has a flashy LED display and some extra features in addition, such as the option of multiple exposure, which I'm quite excited to try out. I only had one Image/Spectra film to try at the beginning of the weekend, so I decided to try out the Image System first. The Image/Spectra films used for this camera have a different image format, not the traditional square, but a rectangular format of 9.2x7.3cm. It also has an electronic display in the viewfinder, which gives you green light if your photo is going to be good, or a warning if it isn't so that you can recompose it.

16/05/2015 - The Old Apple Tree

After the first couple of photos I noticed that the frog tongue was a little bit creased at the edges, which leads to those two light stripes at the edges, where the photo is exposed to too much light when ejected. I plan to eventually replace the frog tongue, but for the moment I found an easy solution to the problem in one of the discussions on Flickr. When you take the photo, instead of releasing the shutter button immediately, keep it pressed down. As long as you don't release it, the photo won't be rejected. (This actually also comes in handy when wanting to take a double exposure with this camera, but more on that when I've tried it out). I took a dark canvas tote with me, sticking the whole camera into it before releasing the button so that the photo is ejected straight into the bag and not exposed to any light at all. And that did the trick beautifully. The stripes are as good as gone or only faintly visible.

16/05/2015 - Garden Corner

Yesterday, two more packs of Image/Spectra films arrived in the post, and I could finally try out the Image Pro. The frog tongue works perfectly here. I just need to read up a bit more about its functions and how to set all the settings on the LED display. It does feel almost modern, compated to the all manual SX-70 and the simple switches of the Image System.