This past weekend at the Film Photography Project’s Walking Workshop in lovely downtown Findlay, Ohio, at the Polaroid Party at the University, they had a couple of stations set up for portrait work. I had used by trusty Auto 250 (Polaroid Model 250 Automatic Land Camera) at Milton’s Help-Portrait event a couple of years back now, which was a hit, but I never thought to hook it up to a studio light. The camera is equipped with a PC socket which allows you to hook up an electronic flash mounted on a bracket, or a radio trigger.
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 664
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 664
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 664
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 664
Mat’s massive Sinar P2 8×10 camera took the two big lights, so I opted for a brick wall backdrop and a single diffused beauty dish from above as my setup. Keep it simple, right? For film stock, I brought along all old Polaroid Stock (2009 expired, so the freshest you can find it these days), two packs of Type 664, a wonderful B&W ISO-100 film, and Type 690, a colour film. The results… excellent, especially the B&W work. It was great to have so many willing and some not-so-willing models step into my ‘studio’ I think I’m going to work on building a similar dish for my strobist kit and doing some more Polaroid Portrait work in pop-up studios. It could be a lot of fun!
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 690
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 690
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 690
Polaroid Automatic Land Camera Model 250 – Polaroid Type 690
Pack film is one of the best (in my opinion) instant formats out there, plus even though Polaroid doesn’t produce the stock any more, Fuji produces a great B&W film, FP-3000b and Colour FP-100c that are readily available through the Film Photography Project, along with the cameras to shoot the film!
Fantastic!
Long Live Film!