Bye Bye Polaroid

does the film industry know this? we still use polaroids for continuity and wardrobe. I would think we would use digital, but it's as fast or convenient. Not to mention, the cost of buying ink to print, because you can't drag that lap top around to show pictures--ALL THE TIME. with polaroids you just flip to it.

It's very sad news.

Oh what?! I'm going to have to stock up on this now and it's already pricey as it is. What a shame. I love Polaroid snaps - it's all the random imperfections that make it stand out from digital. I love digital photography but it's sometimes a little too pristine. Mini printers should solve the problem of having to cart a laptop around but it's the unique quality of a Polaroid snap that I like.

A Holga camera is a good alternative to Polaroids.

I've had cameras all my life and enjoyed taking photos. I never had money to buy much more than bottom end stuff. Still, this is about the level of most camera users out there. This means every camera I have ever owned has been a piece of crap and every photo I have ever taken has been little more than one step above an etch-a-sketch.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s we had the Kodak Brownie. You looked down into it like a periscope going the wrong way. I'd load it with a 12 shot roll of black and white film that lasted all year. We had the Easter pictures, the summer vacation, the back to school, the Halloween costume, and finally the Christmas holidays. I then got developed twelve crummy four inch square black and white photos, reloaded, and started another year. The few color photos we have though are no less crummy. The color is overdone and washes into everything making the simplest scene look supernatural.
That piece of crap was replaced by the Instamatic. This was a bizarre flat shaped thing that you pointed edge on. The 110 size film now made color affordable. It took the same four inch square photo in color and solved the washout problem by making the color hardly noticeable. If you wanted a supernatural photograph for double the cost you could add a flashcube. It created the new special effect called red eye. Every photo taken of any animal with open eyes from 1970 on has the amazing red eye special effect added.
I also had a side adventure in photography with the worst camera ever invented, the Polaroid. This company was years ahead of its time. Today printer companies virtually give away their printers because once you have one you are stuck paying for their ink which is a bargain at ten times the price of platinum. Back in the 1970s it cost $1.00 to take a single Polaroid photograph with a flash. Instead of that one crappy photograph you could instead buy 2 ½ gallons of gas at 40 cents a gallon. I was able to afford about thirty or so Polaroids before I put the damn thing away in a closet where it remains.
The late 1980s to 1990s I afforded my first “professional” camera – a 35mm. This took a photograph so not exactly crappy that it actually looked a tad lifelike. I used color film only now. I could change the settings and avoid the red eye causing flash. I could actually set a timer and be in the photograph too. I was taking a mind boggling four rolls of 24 exposure film for almost one hundred craptacular photographs every year.
Then along came digital. I believe the camera wasn’t even invented until the digital camera was invented. Hand a four megapixel camera to a four year old child today and you’ll get a better photograph than any picture of me taken in my entire life. Today instead of looking at four inch square black and whites or even four by six inch 35mm in color – I get to look at a photo that is big and beautiful and larger than life. I get to take pictures all day long of anything I want. Years ago we went on a big vacation and I took an incredible (at the time) seven rolls of 24 exposures over two weeks time. Last year we went to Paris and I took almost 500 photos the first day. I still wish I had taken even more. Today I even get to be goofy about photos. I have taken a picture of sunrise on the same spot in a local park for every day for a whole year. I have a folder on my computer called Get In My Belly where I have a photo of everything I ate for a month.
Most importantly with digital photography I get to take the best pictures of them all.
I take pictures of everyday life. Previously something had to be “special” to be worth a photograph. What are really special are not necessarily the birthdays and holidays but the “every” days. It’s every day things, like taking my daughter to the playground and pushing her on the swing, that add up to make my life. It’s those common every day things that make life so uncommon. That’s what my photo album is full of today. Thank you, digital photography.

now in the future, when the little kids of today hear "shake it like a polaroid picture" in 'Hey Ya', they're gonna be like, "a wut?" I feel old.

Polaroid will never go out of style, in fact them going digital will only make the orginal poloraid that much more celebrated... It's not like we're talking 8-track to cassette, or cassette to CD or CD to MP3, this is a fucking memory taker and maker. As long as someone has a fucking polaroid pic or camera the legend will live on!

how long do you think it will be before photoshop has a "Polaroid" plugin?

i cannot imagine a world without polaroids