POLAROIDS
I think professionals and amateurs alike should embrace what instant photography has to offer.
A problem that persists even with digital photos is that you need to wait to actually have the picture in front of you. Obviously, film has the classic problem of waiting a week, but even on digital, you can show people your screen, but you really need to take it home first before you can send it to anybody. This is an obvious gap that Polaroids can cover.
I've found, doing event coverage and working with models, that a very quick way to endear yourself to somebody while inspiring confidence in your catalog is to hand them a Polaroid. The irony of this gallery is I can't show you my best work because I give it away. The practical lesson in that is to take two pictures and keep the worse one. I don't do this enough. I will do it more often.
Amateurs should embrace instant for a different reason. I see my fellow camera geeks running around with disposable cameras and bad point-and-shoots that sucked back in the 90s. Genuinely, your phone takes better pictures than a disposable camera and you can text it to your friends right that moment. We like to use old quirky cameras like that because they're imbued with totemic energy that a phone doesn't have, but what I think gets missed there is that the photograph itself can also have that totemic energy.
You've created a talisman. The single extant version of this photograph. This is the ultimate non-fungible token. It's the one and only negative and print. To replicate it is to have it be transformed. To digitize it is to create a photograph of an object.
This is magic. It's alchemy!
I have two cameras, the Lomo Instant Square Glass and the Instax Mini 12. I don't use mini film with the Square Glass, so the difference between the two cameras in this gallery is delineated by aspect ratio. The Square Glass is a head-turning camera with an extremely high skill floor and a less than spectacular flash and I do not recommend it to beginners. I got my Instax Mini 12 because the flash was better, but also becasue it was simpler to use and I could hand it off and everyone at the Halloween party can take a picture.
