Polaroid

[Elspode]

Okay, I'm part of the problem. I haven't shot a Poloroid picture in eons, but man, in the day...they definitely made the money off of me and mine. My folks had one of the collapsible bellows types when I was a wee lad, and I had my own Swinger model and later, an SX 70. A large portion of my honeymoon pics were taken with that SX 70 (especially the naughty ones) when I got married the first time.

Sometime in the early 90's, I found a really nice camera at a thrift store for a buck. It looked practically unused. Even then, I had to hunt down the film for it, but I had a blast shooting with it for a few months.

What will most of us older folks remember most about Poloroid products? For me, it will be the smell of the stop bath/preservative stuff you had to smear on the pics after you peeled off the paper to reveal the nearly-developed photo. That, and watching the image slowly coalesce into wholeness after the thing was spit out the front of the more modern models.