Instantly; Just Wait Sixty Seconds.
When special and/or beloved people visit, they know there’s a good chance I’ll ask to take their portrait with some type of instant or other film camera. But when it’s a holiday weekend and you haven’t seen the loved one face-to-face for 5 months, it’s definitely happening! It’s just a matter of picking the perfect camera and film that fits the special person(s)…
For these two lovely people, I pulled out the vintage Polaroid BIG SHOT Portrait Camera, made famous by Andy Warhol. This weird-looking, gray plastic, fixed-focus, box of a camera uses peel-apart pack-film, the last of which was manufactured in 2016 with an expiry date in 2018. The BIG SHOT is focused through a rangefinder by the photographer moving towards and away from the subject(s) until the two images align — at a distance of roughly 39 inches — it’s another example of brilliant Polaroid engineering and ingenious design!
I had three packs of FujiFilm’s amazing, vintage FP-100c pack film with an expiry date in 2018, which I ordered a month ago from Japan. No guarantee they were stored in a refrigerator, but I’ll never know for sure, because as I loaded a pack into the BIG SHOT, there was a little glitch and I had to open the back to fiddle the pull-tab into position. Pretty sure I fogged and color-shifted the first few shots, as I opened the camera in a dark room with just enough light to see what I was doing! Oh well — here are the results, in the order they were shot — notice the yellow color shift is strongest on the first one, lessening on the subsequent shots:
Camera: Polaroid BIG SHOT Portrait Camera (vintage)
Film: FujiFilm FP-100c Color pack-film (expire 2018)
Photographer: Russ Murray (vintage)
Location: Somewhere in Stamford, CT
And here’s an iPhone capture (background removed) of the BIG SHOT camera, Magicube flashbulb, four instant pack-film photos and their peel-apart negatives:
See you tomorrow!
russ murray 