Since sheltering-at-home some 25 days ago, I have been releasing Polaroids intermittently on my socials. Those photographs turned into my recent piece PANDEMIC ON POLAROID: SHELTERED AT HOME over at EMULSIVE, which I quite enjoyed writing and putting together. Many thanks to EM over at EMULSIVE to get the piece published. The article doesn’t take any liberties with the course of events; we live in such an unprecedented time that there isn’t an need to exaggerate the daily happenings. The descriptions and scenes stand alone be it in words or frames.

Behind the scenes, I filtered through 100 or so Polaroid frames in the current set of work. Most of it is 6 month old SX-70 black and white, which I quite enjoy the look of. The color is actually not SX-70 but rather color 600 film, which with a stop or so of compensation on the brightness wheel on the SX-70 and the MiNT flashbar 600 setting, you can shoot largely without issue. I prefer the 600 film to the SX-70 color; I had initial problems with the SX-70 film early last year with streaking, and haven’t tried the most recent batches.

The frames at the top of the article are from Dallas Fort Worth International, taken from roll number three of that work trip. The Polaroid SX-70 doesn’t travel on work trips (nor does my large format gear), but a Leica IIIc and IIIf with the 50mm Summitar and 135 Canon I’ve had good luck with (both cameras I picked up from Don at DAG Camera, his work is amazing), combined with Ilford HP5+ rated 800 ISO. Developed in my darkroom in HC-110(H) and scanned on my V800, they’re not the greatest scans to be honest but the negatives are crisp; I’ll probably print them next week (I’m behind on printing as it is).

The Polaroid scans I tried very hard to capture the spirit of them; there’s very little manipulation of color or tone and any change was to try to make it match what I had on my desk under the light. Polaroid and instant film in general just has a look and more depth than I’ve been able to get from scans. Overall, they’ve come out rather lovely in their own right.

With so many frames it was hard to par them down. I’ve shot packs of film to form a vision of what has been happening; the whole the greater historical value in my opinion than just a single solitary frame.

In all, I’ve got a lot more work to catalog, both in Polaroid and in some other mediums as this pandemic continues. At this point I’ve got the time, so I’m going to do my best to be creative in new ways.