We’ve been meaning to dedicate a week’s worth of posts to our old collection of Polaroids for a while now and this week seems as good a time as any.
In our college days, we would tote our old accordion-style 240 Land Camera around most everywhere we went. We’d bought it second-…maybe third- or fourth-hand at a thrift store years back, likely ’97 or so—obviously long before the prevalence of digital cameras.
The Polaroid still works to this day—older things like this with so few moving parts last ages, it seems—but the film that remains for these cameras is made in the traditional manner, meaning it uses gelatin, an animal byproduct that’s far from vegan. So our days of peeling back photo paper to reveal our oft-blurry, light bleed-filled, randomly and inadvertently arty photographs are behind us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the images we made way back when.
Apologies in advance for the lower resolution of some of these Polaroids—I scanned most of them in 2001, when the world thought that 1500 pixel width was the height of high resolution.
Above, daisies in a field near Harrisonburg, Virginia. Below, the 240—a magical number for cars and cameras, it seems—retired to a quiet life living room beautification.
