I’ve bought and shot with a lot of old cameras this year. I used to always look for new subjects to shoot with each camera, but at some point this year I started running out of ideas. So I’ve been returning to familiar places, sometimes shooting the same old things but just as often noticing something I hadn’t seen before and shooting it. I’ve made many visits this year to the Broad Ripple neighborhood, to the grand and imposing Second Presbyterian Church, to the old town of New Augusta, and even to the parking lot at work.
I read the Film Photography Project blog, and the writers there have a serious fetish for instant photography. Polaroid hasn’t made instant cameras in years, but these dedicated folks buy long-expired film or new film from the Impossible Project and keep right on shooting. It makes me wistful for the great times I had with a Polaroid pack-film camera in the 1970s. These films give arty-farty results, though, which doesn’t trip my trigger and has kept me away. Then I found out that Fujifilm makes brand new color and black-and-white film for the old pack-film Polaroids. I immediately bought the first pack film camera I found, a 1968 Big Swinger 3000, bought a pack of FP-3000B instant film, and had an absolute ball wandering around the parking lot at work shooting cars. This was the best photo of the day, though my cheap scanner didn’t capture the full range of tones from the print. I’ll be buying a photo scanner here pretty soon and then I’ll write more about my Big Swinger 3000.
