Sunday, September 04, 2005

Playing with Polaroid PolaBlue Film


Polablue dragonfly
Originally uploaded by argusmaniac.
PolaBlue is a weird film. It was (is?) made to produce reverse text slides with a blue background. Therefore, it's a hi-res and hi-contrast film. Also slower than molasses with an ISO of between 8 and 10. I was given a couple of packs of it -- each package has one roll of film and a processsing cartridge. You expose the film and put it and the developer cartridge into the Polaroid Autoprocessor unit..turn the cranks, and voila! in 5 minutes you have developed film that can be used for slides. A great idea for quick slides in the pre-digital photography world -- I recall using this film in the early 1980s for a presentation.


Now however, PolaBlue is an anachronism. I don't know if it is still being sold. The film had an expiration date of 1992, so I figured that I would try a roll out as a slow pictorial film and go for the weird effects. Before I tried it out on something that took planning, I tried a roll out in my yard. To be honest, I am amazed that it was still working. So what you see here is a shot of a dragonfly lawn ornament. The really cool effect was after I scanned the slide and inverted it in Photoshop. That gave me this image.


So, I will save the next roll for when I will be shooting something with lots of hi-contrast forms. That should be interesting, and I'll know what I got within 5 minutes...

1 comment:

  1. hey. i'm a foreigner who stumbled across your blog because i was looking for some information about pola-blue instant film.

    i'm planing to buy some, also the processor... but i was not sure if chemicals still work after being expired for 10years !

    have you had any problems with it, because it was expired ? maybe the process of developement should be longer than 5min to be sure.. i dunno

    is the actual transparent material a negative or a positive ?

    thanks for your time and i'm glad i found you ! ;)

    cheers
    severin

    ReplyDelete

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