Experimentation with Polaroids

Experimentation with polaroids was one of the most frustrating things i’ve ever had to do. I bought the popular Polaroid Onestep Camera since I wanted the polaroids to be a big sized print. After ALOT of attempts and waste of film I think I finally mastered the art of taking polaroid pictures and this blog is the journey of achieving this.

So the picture above is the first polaroid I took with the Camera. As you can see there is this weird whitish hue on the picture which is odd since the posters were very colorful. After some searching I discovered that its better if polaroids are not taken near tube lights because then the pictures will be way to bright since polaroids naturally click with a flash anyways.

Now the second attempt was worse than the first. This time the tube lights in my room were off but the natural light outside my window was directly pointing towards the drawings I wanted to take an image of. The flash and the natural lighting was to overwhelming for the lense hence why the picture is barely visible and covered in white light.

Alright this time I finally got some pictures that are acceptable. I dimed down the lights a lot more and shut the blind in my room but still let a little bit of lights in since I needed to see through the lense. i took a picture of my jewelry box and a bundle of some clothes I bought. I really liked these pictures although they are still relatively bright. But I think these are acceptable to present. I think i’m ready to take some pictures of editorials.

Alright these are by far the best Polaroids I have taken so far. The lighting, the model and background is just perfect. I took these in natural lighting but it was evening hence why it wasn’t bright outside.

Alright so this was the most frustrating part of shooting with this camera. I don’t know what happened with the settings but the flash would stop turning on when I would click for pictures. And since we would take pictures in the dark the polaroids would come as plain black. After a total of 6 films going to waste I by mistake took the 7th picture of my hair and the kitchen when the flash finally turned on. And then I took the very last picture of my model which came out as great. But before I wanted to take more pictures I ran out of film.

Now this was my final attempt of taking polaroids. Now I didn’t want to waste more film since the flash still wasn’t working so I made sure there was some lighting so the pictures would be visible this time. I took these pictures in the evening. I felt like the first picture would have been great if the flash was working. The second picture looked fine I took them in a grass field. The last picture of the sky would have been great but there’s this weird hue of ink on the corner of the picture but I kind of like how it looks.

Alright so I made one more attempt with the polaroid and tried to change the settings in order to bring the flash back. I took this picture of my stilettos and the flash on the camera finally came back. I took these with the tubelight on in my room so i’m surprised with how good this picture ended up looking. In conclusion polaroids are not for the impatient it takes knowledge of knowing the right type of lighting and the settings of the camera in order to take good pictures. Otherwise it’s just a waste of 30 pound film.