This will be a short report mainly about challenges I had while spending half a day at the Vancouver Folk Festival. I've been going to the festival now for a few years straight. In mid-July, it is hot, sweaty and the main action occurs in the parts of Jericho Park that have little shade. Not the best place to be lugging around two cameras especially when one of them is the Polaroid 600SE. That said, I was willing to make a go of it so any challenges after that were purely mental -- and there were many.

Only film

For one thing, this time I went purely analog. I loaded up my 600SE with instant film (Fuji FP-100C) and my Pentax K1000 had slide film. I wasn't worried about running out of film, rather, I was worried about getting proper exposure and the harsh daylight conditions. I'm already past thinking about the cost of shooting film too. Shooting instant film is really almost $3 a pop while shooting slide film -- which for convenience I get done at a local pro shop instead of sending it out, works out to be nearly the same. Of course, consumer developers no longer do slide film; instead they send it out themselves unless you happen to be at the one store in the chain that takes in all of the special developing needs from the whole region. But all of that is for worrying later, not while I am shooting.

G*DAMN peel-apart film

The instant film that the 600SE takes is peel-apart film (also called pack-film). It is the rather beautiful and liquidly vivid Fuji FP-100C. The best example is the one I show below; but here I will describe the worst examples which will never escape from the drawer.

Peel-apart film is film that develops after you extract it from the instant film back. Based upon the temperature, you count to a certain number of seconds before peeling apart the emulsion and see what you get. I have a chart taped to my Polaroid back that has all of the developing times. If you leave it too long, it overexposes; if you peel it too quickly, you get a dark one. To help me with time, I borrowed Sarah's Yoga timer but unfortunately for my first shot I jostled the timer and lost count. Oh well, overexposed crap.

I didn't have problems with exposure for the instant film after that but one other problem with peel-apart films wrecked my third shot (which was actually not bad so it makes me feel even worse about it). The problem is after you peel apart the emulsion, it is still very wet so you have to wait for the print to dry before storing it. For this purpose I had a DVD case. Unfortunately, for my third shot, I was hurried and stored it too quickly and parts of it ended up drying onto the case leaflet. As a result, it was largely wrecked (nice spot over the subject's face -- irreparable).

Shooting slide film

I don't have much experience shooting slide film but from everything I've heard, it is much more touchy on exposure than regular negative film. I don't know why I wanted to make it more difficult on myself but I decided to take on the challenge -- besides I had packed my hand-held light meter too (Sekonic L-358) and thought it would be good enough. What I thought I could do was to check for the general conditions and then go up and down an f/stop in my head whenever I moved from shade to sunny back to shade again. However, after getting the roll back I found the exposure all over the place. In the future, I will have to just keep on checking. I have long since given up on my Pentax's internal light meter, by the way.

Also unforgiving for my exposure was the fact that there is no good shade (hood) for my favourite crowd lens: the Carl Zeiss 20mm f/2.8. It is a very wide lens but without a hood, it will make most things low contrast or at worst, wipe out all the exposure. So not a good combination and I will have to remember that next time. I tend to get some pretty good shots with normal Superia print film so I will probably revert to that until I get better with exposure on slide.

Funky Plunger Baby shots

I've periodically forgotten about my DIY Plunger Baby lens because it is in various states of improvement. Also, the fact that everyone and his cousin now have Lens Babies or do silly Photoshop tilt-shift fakes makes the novelty of using my DIY version really old. But on a whim I brought it along and thought I could squeeze it onto my Pentax for some funky effect. The shot at the top of the striking African mother and her baby was the best one of the bunch; as my exposure problems were compounded by the fact that the Plunger Baby exposes even more than my normal lenses. For that one I basically closed up my aperture to f/22 and raised my shutter speed to 1/5000th. I couldn't close it up more than that. Even so, in Lightroom I had to play with it some more in order to bring the details back. That's the best I could do and I've left in all of the dirt and dust for the grungy effect.

All in all I'm sure I would have got much better results with digital if only because I would be able to know immediately what my exposure was. I don't know if it would have been that much fun. For one thing, I got a couple comments on how great the 600SE looked as I carried it about, so as a fashion item it did it's work. ;)