The second PolaCon NYC event, sponsored by Polaroid, was held from May 17th — 19th, primarily at Worthless Studios in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. I went on Saturday the 18th and had a great time learning, playing with gear, meeting old friends, making new ones, and shooting a bunch of instant photos!

This portrait is of Brian Brooks, lover of instant photography and all things analogue! He was spinning vinyl 7″ singles for PolaCon NYC and is very active in the PolaCon San Francisco events, as you can tell from his t-shirt… Brian patiently posed twice for me because I forgot to turn on the flash for the first shot, which I knew would be too dark (see below)…

Camera: Polaroid SLR 680SE (vintage)
Film: Polaroid 600 Monochrome film (new)
Subject: Brian Brooks / @brian_brooks or @brianxbrooks
Location: Worthless Studios (Bushwick – Brooklyn)
Photographer: Russ Murray (vintage) 

Sometimes, I like to play with the Hipstamatic app on iPhone to add layers of digital edits on top of scanned Polaroid instant photographs. The process is called “baking” and I call the resulting images “Hipstaroids“. I started baking the main (properly-exposed) image of Brian and went down an editing rabbit-hole, losing track of how many times that image went through the Hipstamatic EZ Bake Oven… Here are 9 well-baked Hipstaroids of Brian, roughly in order of baking:

See you tomorrow… 

// russ murray