Search Results for:polaroid
As of September 13th 2017, The Impossible Project is called Polaroid Originals. Apparently the company’s largest shareholder acquired the Polaroid brand and corresponding intellectual property. That seems fitting since the 2008 founded company practically saved Polaroid instant photography. After Polaroid stopped producing instant film, The Impossible Project stepped up to produce new film material. They acquired a legacy Polaroid factory and developed new instant film materials for vintage Polaroid camera models. In addition to the Impossible Instant Lab (allowing Polaroid instant photos […]
Today I started gluing recently produced instant photos to the wall… So, here’s the first iteration of a personal Polaroid gallery. Since we needed to cover some boreholes, we started with a rectangle. Let’s see where it might end. I used tesa Tack, double-sided adhesive pads, to fix the photos to the wall. Despite all the negative comments on Amazon, they seem to be strong enough to hold the photos on my wall so far (no wall paper, I might add).
Polaroid released its cool cam in 1988. It’s basically a pimped Polaroid 600 with fancy neon colours. More infos can be found in the Impossible Project – Camera Museum.
I just recently read Christopher Bonanos’ Instant – The Story of Polaroid in a special limited edition published by Princeton Architectural Press, October 2012. On the back of the book it says: “Edwin Land was one of Steve Jobs’s first heroes, and this book shows why. He created a startup in a garage that grew into a company that stood at the intersection of creativity and technology. This is a fascinating saga, both inspiring and cautionary, about innovation and visionary leadership.” – […]
The Impossible Project: Bringing back Polaroid (Wired UK)
Florian Kaps is on a mission to rescue instant film. So he has taken over an abandoned Polaroid factory in Holland… and rebooted it
An article from 2009 about The Impossible Project in Wired UK with some details on their motivation, their inspiration by Edwin H. Land and their mission to save Polaroid instant photography from extinction. They startet their project in 2008. It’s 2014 and they are still around, continuously improving their film material. So for now, they succeeded.
While testing the POLAROID SX-70 LAND CAMERA SONAR AutoFocus I used film material from The Impossible Project. They develop instant film material for Polaroid cameras in both color and black & white. The film material is made in a former Polaroid factory in Enschede (Netherlands) which they bought in 2008. They basically had to reinvent new instant film material because it was already a dead technology and original color dyes were no longer available. Since their first new instant film in 2010 they […]
With sonar focussing, Polaroid introduced an instant auto focus system for their SX-70 instant film cameras. It is described in the user manual as follows: “As you begin to press the shutter button, your camera releases sound waves to the central part of the scene. The frequencies are far beyond your range of hearing and travel at the speed of sound. The split second it takes for the sound to reach your subject and the echo to return is fed into […]
I started testing a Polaroid SX-70 instant film camera with sonar focusing, which Polaroid advertised as the ultimate in one-step photography. Polaroid implemented an active autofocus system into the instant film camera with ultrasonic sound waves. The distance to the object is calculated by measuring the delay between emission and reflection of sound waves. Therefor this system can also be used in darkness. To my knowledge, it was the first consumer autofocus SLR system. Various SX-70 models were available between 1972 and […]
I still remember the times during my studies of media technology when I dreamed of someday owning a Leica camera. Although I was happy with the Nikon F2 SLR and Nikon 24mm f/2.8 setup I used during the photography classes I took at university, I kept longing for more. A close friend and I spent many nights debating used camera options available at local Leica dealers but always decided to stay away from it. To be completely honest, we dreamed mostly […]
In late 2016 Leica introduced an instant camera, called Leica Sofort. It utilises Fujifilm Instax Mini instant film material and might prove to be another great addition to the recent instant film revival by companies such as Impossible Project, who just introduced their first analog instant camera after selling refurbished Polaroid cameras for many years. Over the past years I used instant cameras quite a bit and experimented with the Impossible Project Instant Lab and their polaroid compatible film material […]
