Oh yeah? Proof it!

I got a new toy for one of my cameras yesterday.

[At last count I've now got something like 16 cameras. But we'll talk about my camera habit in a later post.]




My new toy is a Polaroid back for my Mamiya 645 Super. A Polaroid? Yeah. And it's way cool too! It takes the Polaroid peel-apart 3 ¼" x 4 ¼" pack film that you peel away from the paper after its allotted development time. The whole process is pretty freaking neat. Snap the picture. Pull on the white tab to expose the tab for the picture. Pull on that tab, pulling it through the rollers, distributing the developer across the picture. Let it sit for 90 secs [depending on the film type], then peel apart. And waah-laa! You've got yourself a nice little Polaroid proof.

[I'm working towards experimenting with emulsion transfer. But I don't have all the equipment for that quite yet. I need to find me an old Polaroid Land Camera and a lot of other semi-expensive stuff for that. But it is on my list as one of the alternate processes that I want to learn.]

The Polaroid backs were used with medium format cameras like the Mamiya as a proofer. Before the digital age it, helped the photographer to instantly see that the lighting was good during the shoot before, and all that other good stuff, before shooting with film, and is still done today as such.

I've never worked with this particular film before [my Polaroid experiences have been with the instamatic film] and my Polaroid back unfortunately didn't come with a user's instruction. I bought it off of eBay for like a buck fifty plus $10.95 for shipping, so for $12.45 I'm not complaining since I rarely see one of these go for under $50. Loading the film into the backing was a guess and go, and hoping that I loaded it right. And but of course, I didn't! It wasn't too bad though. Thanks to Polaroid have a lot of documents available on their website, prior to all this I had downloaded and printed a document that helped me figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it. If only the instructions on how to load the film were explained a little bit more. But, in the end I only ended up wasting the first two pictures. Trial and error, but all in all, not so bad.

These are two test shots that I took after finally getting the film loaded correctly.