James Wood Photography

Recently I bought a beautiful old Polaroid SX-70 that turned out not to work. I managed to get a refund… minus the return shipping and the cost of the film ($38!) that it wasted.

I was whining about it on Twitter, in the style of the times. M’very good friend Michael heard about the trouble I’d had and kindly offered me his Polaroid OneStep Plus, which he wasn’t using.

Another good friend, Ben, mentioned that he had some Polaroid film sitting around, left over from a camera that had bitten the dust.

It turned out that the film and the camera were not compatible. The camera works with 150-ISO SX-70 film, but the film Ben had is the newer 600 type, which is the same size but two stops (four times) more sensitive, at 600-ISO. As well as that, the film cassette has some bump things that prevent it from accidentally being put in the wrong type of camera.

But! The internet came to the rescue! It turns out there’s a relatively simple and non-destructive adjustment that can be done to the camera, to trick it into underexposing the film. When combined with a more-sensitive film, this tricks the camera into working (almost) properly. The plastic bumps can also be trimmed off the cassette so that the film fits in the camera.

Turns out that if you insert the film on a slight angle, and jiggle it juuuuust right, you can get the cassette to fit in without de-bumping it. At least, you can on this camera. So! One quick tweak later and I have an old camera that works with the new film. Score!

The film in these examples expired in 2006, so the results can be — unpredictable. The half-shot of the motorbike and scooter is a good example of this. The developing chemicals that are contained in the bottom section of the white border (the thick part), have partly dried up. The rollers that are supposed to spread the chemicals across the photo when it is ejected from the camera are unable to, so only part of the image develops. Sometimes the results are amazing!