This is one of my favourite Polaroid images that I’ve taken so far. I took it near the end of my month long stay in Montréal, working from a studio at OBORO gallery. There was a lot of wildfire smoke that had blown into the city that day, so I was mostly staying indoors, working at the tables that I set up to face the back alley windows. At one point I looked up and was drawn to the green of the tree across the alley, framed by the window’s grid, so I picked up the camera and took this photograph.
(Polaroid taken on June 6, 2025)
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I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the Polaroid i-2 camera that I have been working with off and on for more than a year and a half. And I’ve gone through many packs of film, getting only the occasional image that was doing something that drew me in. The i-Type film for this camera is so sensitive. If it’s too cold out, your image will have a bluish cast and if it is too hot your image will lean towards yellows & pinks. This film is also extremely sensitive to light, so you need to immediately put the Polaroid image into a dark place once it’s exposed and while it’s developing (or it will end up looking really washed out). And of course there’s the scanners at airports to not forget about. All this is par for course, in a way, when getting used to a new piece of equipment, so I just kept testing it but more often than not I was disappointed with the images. Then recently, I discovered that this camera was sent out from the factory (when new) without being properly tested (well, if it was tested, then that’s even worse, because that would mean it was sold while knowing that it had issues). A firmware update was needed to correct the problem and now that I’ve done that, hopefully the issue is resolved and I will no longer waste quite so much film.
Even with all the frustrations I’ve had with this camera and the film, there have been some images (like the one above) that I know I couldn’t have gotten any other way.
I’m still not able to work with this camera consistently or as intuitively as I would like, but I’ll keep working with it. I’ve boughten more film and I need to go out and do some further testing.
(October 9, 2025)