Turns out I was just doing it wrong. 35mm Nikons, 6x7 Mamiyas and 4x5 technical field cameras sporting beautiful German glass... piffle. To truly understand film in all of its capricious, expressively blemished wonderfulness all I really needed was to get my hands on a Polaroid pack camera.
The Polaroid Automatic 220 camera arrived just two days prior to this writing so it's a bit early to say if the above is truly overstating things for effect. It was an eBay buy, and while it's in remarkably good shape, the greater part of purchase expenses was the shipping cost. Should you be tempted to look for such a buy I should hasten to add that the camera did require a bit of surgery prior to use to retrofit the camera to take 3 AAA batteries in place of the out of production 4.5V No. 531 battery it was designed for - a 5 minute job with a soldering iron but something to think about if you're not handy that way.
I've yet to get an entire pack of 10 exposures through the camera, but so far fully half of the images I've taken have gone awry due to some mishap or other. This isn't counting the images that simply came out dark before I learned I need to compensate for the camera's tendency to underexpose. Take for example this test image of my son Brennan.
Classic double exposure it would seem, and simple enough to do with this camera if one simply cocks the shutter and fires off another image before pulling the sheet through the rollers to start that magic development process. What actually lead to this image was a bit more complicated than that however. Unlike Polaroid's more familiar integral film formats such as SX70, 600 and Spectra - the film formats now manufactured by the Impossible Project, Polaroid pack cameras don't just shoot themselves out of the camera to develop before your eyes. After taking an image with a pack camera there is a leader that must be pulled by hand. (I should say as an aside in case you're wondering that Polaroid doesn't make the film for these cameras anymore, it's now manufactured by Fuji.) This still doesn't get the image out of the camera however, it just brings a second tab, the one attached to the actual film, out of a second door where it must be drawn through a pair of rollers that burst the little chemical packets inside the film and spread it over the surface as you draw it out of the camera where, after waiting the requisite period to allow development to occur, the sandwich is peeled apart to reveal whatever it is you managed to get.
Maybe it will just take more practice but my experience is that things here don't always go as planned. Somehow after the image prior to our double exposure mishap above was taken half of what was supposed to be the sandwich that constituted the next exposure, the paper that was supposed to carry the image, came out attached to it. That happened the day before and I had forgotten about it when I wen to take this image until I went to pull the film only to find the other half of the sandwich. Believing that image had simply been a dud I shot a second image on what I thought would be a freshly advanced sheet of film. Obviously whatever actually happened inside the camera was something else. Accidental double exposure despite the best intentions. Happy accident? My son seems to think so.
Happily, being an instant camera, I didn't have to wait several days before the happy accident would be realized and I was able to grab an on purpose version.
Having had the camera all of two days now it's hard to give you more than this these quick first impressions. I'll have more to say on this camera and my experiences with it in future episodes. It probably doesn't need saying but I have no illusions about using this camera for my usual sort of work. It should make for some interesting experiments though. Oh, and let's not forget, it should be great fun at parties too.
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