It's Roid Week! (Thursday)

Untitled, a photo by Hilary (curioush) on Flickr.

Roid Week is a celebration of instant film, on Flickr. See all about it (and other people's photos) here.

This is the last remaining location of Globe Drugs in St. Louis. Globe Drugs — for the uninitiated — is part pharmacy, part wine/spirits store, and (I would say) mostly variety store.

There are so so so many things there, at low low prices. What's in stock changes frequently. Expect the unexpected, for sure. Go check it out!

This photo is a Polaroid transfer. I took the photo with my regular digital camera, printed the photo, and then exposed the image to Polaroid Type 669 pack film (which is no longer made and past its expiration date by a few years, so I keep my last few remaining packs in the fridge for special occasions, like Roid Week!)

After the image is exposed to the pack film, the negative is separated from the positive, and the negative is printed onto something else (in this case, watercolor paper).

"Right this instant" event this Sunday at Urban Eats

Yesterday I knocked over what seemed like an entire bucket of salsa in my refrigerator—what a great opportunity to clean out the fridge! (Sometimes I need a little salsa crisis to spur me into action.)

What worried me the most about this was the stockpile of Polaroid film I've got chillin' like Bob Dylan in there.

Polaroid Corporation stopped manufacturing film several years ago, so as each type that I use was being phased out, I bought up as much as I could. I try to save it mostly for things that I know will be well-suited for the medium—some of the colors of one type really lend themselves to intense skies, for instance. And type 669 is used for Polaroid transfers (see example above. See more about the process here.)

I think I got the Polaroid boxes cleaned up quickly enough that there will be no lasting salsa scars, but I was a little wistful when I saw how small my pile of Polaroid film is getting. It won't last forever, even in the refrigerator, so I put some of it to use recently in preparation for my current show at Urban Eats, "Right this instant." I've got traditional Polaroid photos in the show, as well as Polaroid transfers and emulsion lifts, and Holgaroids, photos made with a Holga camera with a Polaroid back.

The show is hanging up throughout May, and I'll be at Urban Eats this Sunday, May 23, from 11:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Come say "hi"! (There will be food and drinks for sale in the cafe. And while you're at it, see work from Angie Griffith, Naomi Silver, Thomas Shepherd and the PPRC Photography Project. You can download a flyer with more information on all the artists here.)

Hope to see you Sunday!

Urban Eats Cafe (enter Urban Arts Collective through the cafe)

3301 Meramec St (at Virginia)

St Louis, MO 63118

PS. There is a company that is trying to revive some Polaroid film. Learn more about it here.

The value of using the good stuff

You know what's fun?  Making Polaroid transfers.  In a nutshell, it involves taking a photo (or copying another image) using Polaroid peel-apart film.  And then prematurely separating the negative and positive of the Polaroid and using the negative of the Polaroid film to transfer the image onto another surface.  Many people use watercolor paper as the transfer surface.

I'm enchanted with the process, but it takes a number of different steps and there are variables -- wet or dry paper, how warm to keep the paper while it's developing, how much time to allow the film to develop before separating it, etc.  I've experimented with a lot of different ways of doing things and it's always educational, even if I don't get something I like.

A few months ago I was out of watercolor paper, so I bought a different type of paper from what I had used previously.  It was sort of environmentally friendly paper, which was a plus.

So a few weeks ago I got out all my Polaroid-transfer-making equipment to make a batch of transfers and ack!  Everything I got was awful awful awful.  This made me a little sad because no matter what variables I experimented with, they all looked terrible.  Such as this guy:

Then I got a notice that a local art supply store was having a sale on Arches watercolor paper, which is sort of the gold standard of watercolor paper.  It's beautifully made and has been made beautifully for something ridiculous like 600 years and it's what I'd been using prior to my other watercolor paper experiment.

That's more like it.

To learn more about the Polaroid transfer process, check out this entry on AlternativePhotography.  Relatedly, see (terrific) local photographer Jane Linders's post about making Polaroid emulsion lifts here.

(For more Polaroid transfers, see Tiffany Teske's amazing work here.)

Let it snow

When I was a kid (and perhaps since I've been an adult) I used to do some mental bargaining when there was a chance of snow: "if we get a snow day I will totally do the studying I didn't do tonight", "if we get a snow day I will clean up my room", etc. Sometimes that works, usually doesn't.

Anyway: word on the street is that there might be a snow day tomorrow.

For a while I've been meaning to work on making some Polaroid transfers, which I haven't done in some time. So tonight I'm bargaining that if we get a snow day tomorrow, I will make something.

It might not be a Polaroid transfer right now (although I did get a pack of film out of the fridge, so the easy part is out of the way), but it's possible I'll finish cutting the fabric for a purse I'm making, or that I will go through Thanksgiving and Christmas family photos and get them uploaded somewhere.

Baking chocolate chip cookies counts as making something, in my estimation, so that might be the ticket.

If we get that snow day.