Paul's Film Photography Blog

Polaroid OneStep 600

So last week I was in Goodwill in Vinton, pretty much just killing time. Any time I go in there (or any Goodwill store) I make a bee-line for the electronics section to see what unwanted gems might have shown up since last time I was in.

Typically I’m interested in their motley of computer odds and ends and more recently any cameras they happen to have. Vinton’s Goodwill tends to have a rapid turnaround of cameras; last time I was in they had a matching pair of Polaroid JoyCams, before that they had a couple of 35mm point and shoot zoom cameras.

I’d sort of been hoping they’d have still had the two JoyCams; earlier I’d been listening to an episode of the Inside Analog Photo podcast where they talked about 3D photography and my fevered imagination had those two matching lenses sitting side-by-side in a homemade camera designed to put a stereo pair of 6×6 images onto 120 slide film. Probably for the best that the JoyCams were gone.

Vista View 35 XL

In their place were a couple of other Polaroid cameras, a One Step 600 and an earlier type which I can’t recall the model name of. The older camera was pretty beat up looking and the lens had some nasty gouges in it, but the OneStep was in excellent condition and found it’s way home with me, along with the most plasticy camera I’ve ever seen, a VistaView 35 XL, with fixed focus, fixed aperture and fixed shutter speed. About the only metal part is the hotshoe (which after some remedial work, turned out to be a real, live hotshoe capable of firing a flash). Putting film in it doubles the weight and quadruples the value of the camera.

It’s funny really, I never quite “got” the reasoning behind shooting Polaroid or plastic, toy cameras, yet in one fell swoop, I ended up covering both of those bases and am looking forward to trying them out with a level of anticipation that’s clearly on the wrong side of lunacy (and no, I haven’t been drinking Rodinal or anything to get into that state).

I’ve already run a half dozen frames through the VistaView as a test, before rewinding and reloading the film in my Canon. I’ll see how they go but I can see this being a fun wee thing loaded up with cheap store brand 200 film, or maybe some of that inexpensive Arista Premium rebranded Tri-X from Freestyle Photo. Or maybe I’ll have 8 inches of blank, fogged nothingness. Who knows, until the film is souped…?

As for the Polaroid, I have options for obtaining film stock. There’s eBay, where you’ll sometimes find a seller who hasn’t been overdoing it on the hillbilly heroin and prices their expired 600 film within the bounds of sanity. There is also, of course, the Impossible Project and their new, experimental PX600 variants. Best of all though, the new, rebuilt Polaroid themselves are planning a comeback for the 600 cameras and film.

With all the online talk about lenses being “tack sharp”, “corner to corner sharp”, “sharp wide open” and so on, you could be forgiven for thinking that any lens that isn’t “sharp” is fatally flawed, good only as a paperweight.

Sometimes, sharp is exactly what you want. But I wonder if this obsession with perfect lenses isn’t going too far; yet another aspect of photography that’s being homogenized into perfect, bland sameness along with the sensors in digital cameras.

Wide open, effective 100mm/2.8 with plenty of spherical aberration.

I’m seriously starting to see where the Lomography movement and the Polaroid freaks are coming from. Perfection in our gear means one less thing we can use to differentiate our work from the next guy with a sharp lens and 20+ megapixels behind it. Imperfections, be they random Holga light leaks, or weird colors from cross-processed film, or any of the other things which camera manufacturers are trying so hard to “liberate” us from, are something we can embrace to make our work unique or different. Sure you can do it in Photoshop, but it’s always going to be “pseudo-imperfection” generated by an algorithm.

I recently picked up a cheap 2x teleconverter, a 4-element multicoated Vivitar. General Internet opinion would suggest that any amount of money spent on this was wasted money, and looking at the first shot taken with it (wide open, in flat, bad lighting) it seemed like that was a fair assessment.

But I tried a few other shots, with the 50mm f/1.4 FD lens and teleconverter and good lighting. Wide open it has a ton of spherical aberration around highlights, giving a soft focus, dreamy sort of look. I have a feeling this would be a satisfying portrait lens if used right. I’ll be sure to put that theory to the test!

What if I want actual sharpness? Well, the trick is that most lenses perform very well when stopped down. There’s a lot of techno-babble and optical diagrams out there which explain this a lot better than I can (I understand why optics work like this, but am not great when it comes to communicating these things to non-geeks).

The point is, by stopping down even a couple of stops (in this case, to an effective f/5.6) the dreamy look goes away and real sharpness starts to set in. The next image is a case in point.

How can you look at this and *not* feel just a wee bit happier? Effective 100mm f/5.6, focused as close as possible.

Ignore the horizontal lines, these look to be scanning issues and will be corrected once I’m able to.

This was just 2 stops away from wide open, but already is looking much more like those sharp lenses everyone keeps going on about! Extra bonus, the close focus distance stays the same so now I have a near-macro lens option.

Not bad for a $10 investment whatever the Internet might say about it.