Pola views

Helmut Newtown produced a book called Pola Woman a beautiful book of many of his "test" images, he mentioned that he let his wife get away with using his Polaroids as place mats under coffee cups and such like when ever they had a party, and somehow this symbolizes the demise of Polaroid IMO.

There are groups on flickr (<- you have to log into flickr for that one!) dedicated to Polaroids fantastic 55 P/N film which is sadly no longer made. People purchased this stuff in great quantities determined to either horde it or sell it on at unreasonable prices.

And today I came across Polanoid, a place on the web dedicated purely to photos taken with Polaroid, but it looks like it's mostly the Land Camera types of films which while nice, don't really float my boat quite the same as the larger formats.

But recently it looks like there are a couple of places determined not to let Polaroid films disappear, something I for one am very pleased about, but there's always a catch, and in this case they seem determined to keep all but the 55 P/N alive! I do hope they are able to somehow revive this beautiful product, because despite various attempts I have yet to see anything that comes close to the sumptuous tones and velvet softness that this film and others from Polaroids 5x4 inch films are capable of creating.


I remember seeing images created by Malcolm Venville using Polaroids monster 20x24" Camera, the images took my breath away, in fact some of those images are the first ones on the above link, the web doesn't do them justice.


So this got me wondering, is it because I came to photography late that I wish to be able to use these films but I can't because they're no longer produced, something akin to the unreachable dream girlfriend or sports car you'll never likely to have, is that the reason I go all gooey when I see images created with this stuff or what is it? You ask the average jo(ette) blogs what they think about the images created by these films, and they'll probably say "they look soft" or "the colours are all whacky", maybe I'm just getting old, but I dream of being able to shoot a fashion session with some of this film, and until someone comes up with a convincing digital alternative I'm sticking to my guns!

Disclaimer: I cannot vouch for any of the links or content of the links posted here, and I am in no way affiliated with any of these sites. Just thought I'd put that out there!

Been a bit quite

Sorry folks (I know your out there... I can hear you breathing) just started back to work, so not much going on here right now, we've also had some great friends from Switzerland staying with us which has been excellent fun, and has got me thinking about doing some more sport photos, I don't mean the standard type thing but more extreme sports but we'll see how that pans out.

At the moment I'm planning a Beauty shoot this weekend, so hopefully I'll have some images worth putting up here.
In the meantime here's one which has nothing to do with Fashion but does contain a mirror.

Cheerio!

The New Site

Well the new site is up and running, and it even has PicLens enabled, and e-commerce but I have yet to switch that on.
Thanks to David Knoble over at Lightroom Galleries for making an awesome contribution to the Lightroom users by making all of these great tools for web hosting etc. At first look the LRG3 seems a bit daunting, but once you have some time to read through it things become clear pretty quickly, the only frustrating thing I found was that every time I exited out of the Web module and then came back in, I had to retype the path for the given page/gallery etc. bit annoying, but hey... it's a free download and that makes this a brilliant piece of www.

Adobe on the other hand still hasn't got it... while making the gallery I ran into the age old problem... Copyright. Adobe is brilliant at hammering the crap out of people who copy their ideas, but when it comes to actually supporting the Photogrpahers and people who use their Software they just don't seem to listen, I've browsed the Lightroom forums, and I admit there are some stupid, if not crazy requests on there, but please... how hard can it really be to implement a tool for people to be able to write © Copyright Joe Blogs 2009 over their images, where they like and as large as they like etc. etc.
I've been using this great piece of software for over two years now, and I have dutifully paid the upgrade costs, and am impressed with the various tools that they have now implemented, such as the Gradient tool... it's great no doubt about it, but I would seriously give it all up in order to have better copyright overlays. Grrr!

I came across these the other day on the "A Photo editor" website they are great and very inspirational. So thanks to Rob Haggart for posting those.