This evening I was lamenting my dire photographic situation to Jake. Firstly, without my mac, my iPhoto library is useless, so I’m on photographic hiatus for the time being. Secondly, my trusted camera, the Canon A60 (rating in at a now embarassing 2 megapixels), is on it’s last legs, giving me the dreaded E18 error more often, and inserting some pretty impressive streaking effects across my photos. Lastly, my Flickr account has only hours left of retaining it’s ‘Pro’ status before it is so harshly demoted to a mere resource-sucking leech. It has been a great year with Flickr, but I will remain an unpaid user until I have some spare monies, and frankly there are more important things to put my money towards at the moment (uh, like a new camera?). The down side is almost half of my photos will disappear come the 28th of September according to whatever clock Flickr uses.
I did have a moment of artistic soap-boxing, however, telling myself that art doesn’t need the latest technology. Often, the best art comes in spite of technology. With that spurt of under-researched wisdom, I searched the house top to bottom to find my old Polaroid instant camera. I managed to find everything but the machine that would spit out overly yellow squares, including an Advantix camera (expensive film!), an old digital camera (i’m talking pre-1 megapixel), and old SLR (which took a strange type of film), and about a hundred old mobile phones (what are we supposed to do with these again?). I searched every box and every drawer I have stuffed full of my childhood things, but the camera doesn’t seem to be with me anymore. I have a vague recollection of lending it to someone, possibly family. I also have a vague memory of playing with it not all that long ago. I’m very afraid it ended up in the wrong box when we moved and is now the town hall for a city of rats in landfill somewhere.
Ultimately, I realise, the thing is simply too expensive to use on a regular basis, and would probably be a nightmare to find good cartridges for. I guess there is also eBay. It might have even brought me $10 closer to a new camera.
No monies? You have two lots of scholarhsip monies! Gah.
Zoe: I have to keep some monies for some things!
I am starting to become distressed with my camera – the batteries seem to be emptying at a very disturbing rate and show a lot of charge when taken out and put on the tester in the charging uint.
A friend of mine still uses a Polaroid camera regularly. She’s an artist, and loves the way they come out. Though cartridges are expensive, they’re not difficult to find; any good camera store will stock them (I bought her one from Canberra Camera House for her birthday).
I love the look of Polaroid shots, but you *would* need to do a whole lot of scanning and cropping stuff that is no problem with digital. Have you done any research into the camera you have? Maybe there’s a fix? Some cameras allow you to update the firmware through CF cards.
Kevin – Sounds like time for a new one! Am I practicing disposable consumerism enough?
Kit – There are some great Polaroid shots on Flickr. Clearly, they’ve had some colour correction. The other problem is you are left with such a small print, and no negative. I guess thats the medium – if you want anything bigger for larger prints, don’t use Polaroids. As for my Canon camera, Canon are not helpful at all regarding this error message, prefering to pretend it doesn’t exist.