Snuffing Unicorns

In which our Hero is careless in the magical woods and wrecks his own day.

I was all excited on Friday. I’d just gotten a package in the mail containing my order containing several packets of analog film. Add to that the roll I’d loaded in my old APS camera and you get plans for analog domination of the universe. At least for the weekend.

Project 1: Have a blast playing with the new polaroid film. I’m excited for two reasons. One is that the expense is really on the same order as the old expired film so it’s okay as an occasional indulgence. Two, it’s film specifically for my camera. The stuff from 2005 that I was using was beautiful and fun, but also not for my older Polaroid, which meant using it required physical surgery with a knife to make the cartridge fit, and it meant manipulation with a gel to make the camera run with the slower film. Except slower film means you need more light and while I have polaroid film, it’s oddly difficult to find polaroid compatible flash cubes.

But this stuff, this new stuff, it’s… magic. Seriously magic. It’s still being invented. So there’s small issues with consistency, and large issues with technology. The chemistry isn’t as stable. So the prints are still sensitive when the emerge. No waving them in the air, this time, it’s turn them over and let them set in the dark a few minutes. And second, there’s black and white, and there’s kinda-colour. The new colour film basically behaves a lot like the expired stuff, or for you young-at-heart-uns, like Hipstamatic on your phones.

It’s gloriously analog, cheerfully unpredictable, joyfully irreproducible. The pictures are utterly unique, and even the failures become interesting with a little time.

(Also cool, they gave me a free plastic dinosaur in my order. It’s hilarious and even better is that on the packing slip, in addition to the 2 x Polaroid Film, there’s a line that reads 1 x Rawrrrrrrrrrrrrr! )

Project 2: I don’t know the precise origin story, but back in the day, which usually means 70s for this sort of thing, some manufacturer in China decided that they needed to make cameras for the masses. And the result was a little bit of Chinese ingenuity combined with a little eastern European chic: The Holga, a camera that was all plastic, even the lens, and manufactured with the same kind of quality that I remember from some of my happy meal toys in the day. It fit together, and it worked, but it leaked light, and the plastic lens wasn’t exactly optically consistent, and sensitive to scratches and the lens was fixed focus (at least originally) so no zoom. It was basically a reusable disposable camera.

And it became a legend. Because it wasn’t just crap, it was simple. It was magnificently simple. There was no zoom, no aperture, just point and click and discover what you’ve got. It’s become semifamous and the result is sort of a style of photography almost.

Now there’s a Holga lens available through ebay for DSLRs and for 20 bucks I can have a fixed focus plastic lens on my fancy camera. Part of me wonders (and asked) if the whole thing is about noisier analog shots with limited options, isn’t it more a philosophy than a technology? Do I really need a lens to do this? I’d say no, but then serious photographers seem to include Holga’s in their toolbox. But I’m mostly sure I’m going to to get one, too, because it’s too cheap to really miss out on the chance to play.

Project 3: Homebrew Film Scanner

This one is kind of an interesting project because it’s a bit more physical than the others. (Only a bit). I have an APS camera I got back in ’96 or so, and I’ve shot a lot with it. And then after I switched to digital my parents took it over and shot even more. Except that APS film is “odd” in that it lives in the film canister rather than as exposed negatives, and so for the last few years I’ve been looking at various options to get all those old rolls scanned and… it’s not a pretty problem. I’ve got enough rolls that at the 20-bucks-per-roll price point, I’d be spending too many hundreds of dollars to do it. And at that spend level, I could just *buy* a film scanner and do it myself except those are harder to find. And it seems that I’ve dawdled long enough that both options aren’t becoming cheaper or easier.

But I read about a curious little project that someone did to build an adapter so that they could use their digital camera as a negative scanner. And I think I could probably do the same with APS film but at the same time, but I need to test, and that requires me to break open a canister. And I’m not going to do that on old pictures that I want to see, so I need to shoot a new roll of film and use it up.

Pursuing project 3, I shot a whole bunch of stuff, a few of my parents, a few of my toes. It was funny as we discovered “Oh, we can’t see the result” and it’s startling to me how slow the camera is because I remember it as being so crazy fast when I got it. I’ll blow the rest of the roll on Monday when I get out of the house.

And feeling very flushed with the glee of getting new film and finally getting my APS film scanner project moving forward, I was all excited and decided to get out the polaroid and shoot something with that too. Unfolded the camera, found the release, pulled out the old film cartridge and…

and..

oh my god.

There’s still film in there. I’m looking at the milky surface of a could-have-been polaroid picture.

I just exposed an unused piece of polaroid film to the room. I just completely and thoughtlessly wasted one of the last original polaroid prints in the world.

I was in shock. I had just extinguished a little bit of the magic in the world. I had just killed a unicorn.

I know it’s just film and I know I’m no artist but I felt like I had let down all the enthusiasts and the generation of people who have used and loved this stuff all the way to me and beyond. And so I put everything away and went to do something else because all the heart had gone out of me.