Polaroid 55

On Hank's second day at our house, August 14th, I tried to do a photo shoot of him.  The girls helped me out, but it is really difficult to get an eight week old puppy to sit still.  But, we wanted to get a couple of shots of him while he's still really small... only 4-1/2 pounds to be precise.

I set up my view camera in the back yard, in the early evening.  I used the grass and a wall of prairie sunflowers as a backdrop.  I had a 400mm telephoto lens on my view camera so I could get in tight on the little rascal.  But, that meant very limited depth of field, and even with faster 400iso film, the shutter speed was a little on the slow side.

I took two shots on HP5 and then two more on Tri-X.  After that I had to drop the shutter speed from 1/15 second to 1/8 in order to shoot two more sheets... this time color... on Kodak Portra 160VC.

Then, just for the hell of it, I shot a sheet of Polaroid 55.  This meant an aperture of F9.0 and a shutter speed of 1/8 second.  This film was discontinued some years ago and there is nothing else that comes close.  It is an instant film that yields both a positive proof and a negative.  The stock that I was using expired 21 years ago in July of 2001.  The pod of developing agent in the packet didn't feel quite right, but I shot it anyway.  This film was given to me by my friend Clive, a few years ago.  Clive passed away shortly after that from cancer.

The chemistry didn't seem to spread properly over the surface of the materials.  The print developed reasonably well, though there were some blobs of chemistry that I had to wash away after I opened the envelope... not something that was normally necessary.  I cleared the negative in Sodium Sulfite and then washed it.  Its still washing as I write this, and I'm not sure if it developed properly.  

If the negative doesn't really work out, then at least I have a passable positive, plus the other sheets that I shot and have not yet developed.  And no doubt the little mutt is going to have to endure a few more photo shoots in the coming weeks and months.