Today I was shooting some portraits with my 4x5 Sinar. I am woking on a project to be a birthday present for my wife which entails photos of our two kids. Shooting portraits with the large format in this mode, close to the subject, inside in a controlled environment proved quite enjoyable. But my kids wanted to see what the photos might look like. They are of the current generation, totally connected and digital, where "instant" digital photography rules the day. They are of a generation that is not used to waiting for anything much less things like photos so the notion of film is lost on them. But why dad would you want to take pictures this way? A very good question when you think about it.
So I decided that I would show them as best I could what the images would be like, frankly I was curious to see what the shots might look like. I still have some Fuji FB100c45 Polaroid style film loaded into a holder so I put it into the camera and shot one image of each. Two images for the price of lunch. The images were wonderful. Sharp, good rich color, and instant. Well relatively instant, as they developed in about 2 minutes. It satisfied the kids curiosity but it also gave me confidence that the regular film images I had shot were properly exposed,focused and should return good results.
When I first learned advanced photography, doing large format work, we would always shoot lots of Polaroids. Outside of photography class in college I worked with two professional photographers. One a professional shooting architecture the other a professional shooting studio work for advertising. Both used copious amounts of Polaroid test shots as confirmation and "insurance"! These professionals both had a lot on the line and did whatever they could to insure that the shots we took with the real film would be spot on what they expected. They were both disciplined and systematic. The architectural photographer would meticulously compose the shots down to the finest details as would the studio photographer. For both the Polaroid test shot was a critical way for them to know that composition was correct, that exposure was close and that there were not likely to be surprises. Today we don't worry about these things when shooting digital. We have instant views of our shots and can have confidence when we leave the location that our images are good. If it is really important we can look on the screen of a laptop to check focus and exposure. But no worries digital tells us instantly if we have the shot.
But alas Polaroid as a photography company is long gone, Kodak has filed for bankruptcy and Fuji is behaving like a company that would like to kill it's analog film business even if they have a potentially viable market. When I first started back into film photography I replaced the equipment I once used, at a fraction of the cost of new. I was giddy at the quality of gear I could buy. I could again capture the high quality large size images on film which would be far lager and superior to my digital SLR's. An equivalent digital image would cost me dearly in current professional gear. For the time being the principals of physics still rule as cramming pixels onto a sensor still has it's limits at least at my price range. As I acquired the gear and the consumable materials I quickly learned that one aspect of my workflow would prove problematic. The instant film my mentors had used to insure they had the images they wanted was vanishing or already gone. Polaroid was long gone and their competitor Fuji could not make it's mind up if it wanted to be in this business or not. They first released "new" products for the US market and then only a year after doing so seemed to prove they either had bad management or the market was changing so quickly.
So I have learned that to shoot regular film without the benefit of the safety net of instant test shots. Sure I can still get the off size instant Fuji film. It must be for 120 shooters of which their must be more of but with a 4x5 cameral it is really not much of an aid. It does not cover the full frame so you can't see the edges of the shot a key reason for shooting large format test shots in the first place. With a wide angle lens seeing the dim edges on a ground glass can be almost impossible. As a result you shoot blind not knowing until you have the developed images if you have the shots you expected. In the studio where you can leave things set up this is less of a problem. But for architectural photography where you might have one time access to a space this can prove to be a real issue. If something goes wrong as it is apt to happen with analog photography you may not get another chance to get the shot.
So I am lamenting that most of the instant film which once existed is simply no longer available. Why? Is there not some Chinese company which would gladly make smaller quantitates of these products for a limited consumer marketplace? Is the management of Fuji so screwed up that they cannot figure out a way to make smaller limited quantities a profitable viable business? Really? Or is there something else at work here, something more cynical? The images I captured were really cool. I will post them when I get to my scanner. That might not produce the same result but I will do it. For now I am just pining for products that used to be and are no longer.
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