Last year sometime they stopped making instant Polaroid film, but don’t despair, now thanks to the magic of software called Poladroid Project you can recreate those “thrilling” green tinged soft focused images from your crystal clear perfectly color balanced 10 megapixel images your digital SLR produces. They have even recreated the agonizing wait while your photo develops, the only thing lacking is the ability to pick up your monitor and wave it around to help speed the process.
Ed Note Jan 2023: The Poladroid Project is long defunct, but I managed to track down a copy of the program using Google and the Internet Archive and it still works on Windows 11. Interested? Poladroid 0.9.6, 6MB download
Maybe the reason I think this is so cool is because my very first camera at about 10 or 11 years-old was a Polaroid Swinger…
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 96
Isn’t it amazing how COOL we thought those things were. To actually be able to get a picture seconds (wel, minutes) after you took the picture. No matter that they never kept the color for long or were of lousy quality. It was just cool.
Now, we EXPECT to be able to see a picture IMMEDIATELY after we take it.
Our kids will never understand.
I remember having to protect the finished picture with a swipe of some mysterious sticky stuff…
In a wave of nostalgia I went to ebay looking for a Swinger for sale and sure enough there were a few. The wave was quite shallow because I never really considered buying one – no film anymore.
What about when you were taking pictures outside in the cold? I remember dad handing the new shots to us to stick in our armpits to warm them while they developed. I have no idea if they would have developed badly (worse?) in the cold or if dad just did it to give us something to do so we would shut up.
Warming it up just sped up the developing process (not by much though.)