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This morning my father returned home from a carboot sale bearing a camera in a box for me. He knows I like my weird photographic things and went out on a limb, hoping I’d like it.
It was a boxed Kodamatic 950 instant film camera by Kodak. Made a good three decades ago and pretty much redundant today because Polaroid filed a law suit claiming infringement of copyright meaning the film that it took could no longer be sold. However, when I looked on the back, I saw it had 5 film left in it.
In my hurry, I installed 4 new AA batteries and walked into my father’s office to test it out. Sure enough the light on the camera still flashed and a film popped out of the bottom and started to develop. Sadly the film was far too expired to reveal any detail. So I put it to one side.
As the day got brighter I kept thinking about the camera. It still had 4 film left in it. Instant film, no longer made, practically illegal and from a company that’s slowly ceasing to exist. What if the front film I took of my Dad had somehow been exposed in the twenty odd years it had sat there? I took the camera outside, stood in the sun and took a portrait shot of myself with the exposure setting set to bright (lighter) and the flash on! To my amazement, the next film that came out, the 4th left, still had a bit of detail!
The pictures above show a straight scan, then an edited version where I have cropped in on the image and brightened the picture revealing the detail of my face and the trees behind. It might not be much, but I find this amazing.
What do I do with the other three film left in the camera? Do I sell it as a set so someone more creative or artistic can use it or do I wait for a special occasion?
