Instant gratification

I've been taking pictures for a while now and it's one of the many things that I enjoy a lot and spend too little time doing. During university I learned the basics of film development and got a decent SRL for Christmas one year. It was a great camera, but the pain of having to wait to get the pictures developed was always something that bothered me since I'm very much an instant gratification kind of person. Later I got several mediocre digital cameras until picking up a pretty fancy model this last Christmas. Although the camera takes great pictures and obviously delivers the results instantly, the digitalness of it has never appealed much to me. Printing the pictures is ok, but it still feels like an artificial second step to a system where the pictures want to remain digital, uploaded to my Picasa album.

While I was in Mexico in March I managed to get a friend of mine to lend me his vintage Polaroid SX-70 camera, the worlds first SLR. Old-style Polaroid cameras are wonderful because they give you instant printed pictures. I feel that I can give up a little quality and portability in favor of 70s colors and the uniqueness of pictures that come from these simple machines. However, the camera turned out to be quite broken. It didn't close properly, I couldn't actually see anything out of the viewfinder and it neither took pictures nor ejected the film. After hours of thumb-numbing work I've manged to fix it and took my first pictures this weekend. I still need to install an ND filter on it to fix the exposure, but it works!

During repairs

Repaired / First pictures