Spring and summer pass right by without me ever thinking about instant photography. But come autumn, I start dreaming of Polaroids. I don’t get it, but I go with it.
I’m also on a jag to shoot up the expired film chilling in my fridge. That film wasn’t expired when I bought it — I’ve just been slow to shoot it. It’s in the fridge; it’s fine. But some of that film are last rolls of stuff you can’t buy anymore, such as Kodak Plus-X, Arista Premium 400, and my last pack of Fujifilm FP-3000B instant pack film. Can you see where this is going?
I had an idea for a photo essay. I loaded that FP-3000B into my Polaroid Colorpack II and started shooting. A couple shots in, I realized my photo-essay idea was terrible and that I wasn’t getting very good exposures. Sometimes, things just don’t work out. So I just shot the rest of the pack around the yard, enjoying my camera and the last of this film.
I have a one-car garage. During the warm months, it’s full of bicycles and lawn-care gear, and I park my car in the driveway.
I inevitably get lazy about storing things, and a bunch of junk accumulates on the garage floor. So one of of my late-autumn rituals is to put the bikes and yard gear in the shed and to properly store or pitch the accumulated junk so I can park my car in the garage during the cold months. Here’s this year’s mess.
This was a year of home projects. I hired many of them out, first and foremost the removal of my 21 dead ash trees. But I also had my windows and shutters scraped, reglazed, recaulked, and repainted. I rolled up my sleeves, too: I did a lot of landscaping in the wake of the tree removal, and I also repainted my front door. The previous owner had slapped a careless coat of white paint onto what had been a finished wood door, and it always looked pretty bad. I stripped all the old finishes off and painted the door in a copper color, which harmonizes with browns and oranges in my house’s bricks. In the spring, I’ll have that old aluminum storm door replaced with one of those great white vinyl doors with a rollaway screen.
One of my landscaping projects was to finally do something about the dead patch right behind my house. A vast patch of English ivy lay here when I moved in. It was a great ground cover, but it was also laced with poison ivy. There was no way to kill the poison ivy without also killing the English ivy — and it took years to do it, as both are hardy and persistent. But I succeeded, and for the past couple years I’ve had a big patch of dirt back here. The soil eroded, and I ended up with a negative grade — ground sloping toward the house, which risks water getting into the foundation. So I bought a ton of topsoil and got a bunch of help. We spread the dirt to create a positive grade, and then we planted nine boxwood bushes and spread some mulch to help keep that soil from eroding. I had all these big rocks in another spot in the back yard from some landscaping a former owner did, landscaping superseded by a later owner. I moved those rocks here to create a border.
With all of this work around the house and yard this year, it’s no wonder I managed just one road trip this year, my October trip down the National Road in eastern Indiana.
Just for fun, I wanted to see how the Colorpack II and the FP-3000B would handle a double exposure. Here are my bikes, ready to go into the shed.
If you want to see the rest of the shots from this pack, check out my Polaroid Colorpack II gallery. There you’ll also see some wonderful spring-flower shots I made with this camera on FP-100C color pack film. The Fujifilm pack films are just great. I daresay I like them better than the old, long-out-of-production Polaroid pack films.
Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader! Click here to subscribe.
