Polaroid Land Camera+ FP100C

Last week was Polaroid Week, (or 'Roid Week) and I made almost no acceptable images, So instead of being sad, I'm honoring Edwin with this post.
I shot Polaroid and Fuji instant film all through Asia. (well at least in Korea and Japan) While in Korea, I had a mostly functional Polaroid 350. I took hundreds of polaroid prints home with me in a box that i'm yet to scan(Still waiting for them to flatten out). Since Korea, I replaced the bellows and accidentally punched a new hole through it. Thankfully a wonderful friend gifted me a brand new to me polaroid 250

If you're unfamiliar with Instant film, It makes some gorgeous images. I have a soft spot for any type of instant film because of my past affiliation with These Guys. In terms of instant film, Fuji's FP100C is especially special. Typically instant film produces a positive print that you can scan and do what you like with it. But with FP100C, you can also recover the negative itself. Some old polaroid films like Polaroid type 55 and Type 665 could get a positive and a negative. FP100C is a color film with a color negative, almost unheard of in modern film photography. The process to get the negative isn't so cut and dry. You must use a form of bleach to remove the black material on the back of the film. I've recently began using The Brothers Wright's workflow. Here are both some really terrible examples, as well as some pretty awesome ones. Using bleach has a chance of destroying, or shifting the colors of the film, so I am especially drawn to this material. Take a look at most of my previous work on my site here, and you can understand some other examples.

Starting with one of the first photos I shot, this was the view I had every evening. My apartment sat on the Nakdong River in Busan.

Poor Kitty Post Spay

Night photography is extremely difficult with this film, the reciporicty failure is very high.

If you leave your film out, this type of surface appears and won't go away when you're reclaiming the negative.

A super weird self portrait, the positive looks vaugely like this. There seemed to be too much bleach with this one.

This was from the lot of negatives in the picture above. My negative reclaimation only improved from here.

And finally a nearly flawless negative. Really happy with this new workflow. Now to find more film....

Fujimoto Semi Sport

So this is a story of sheer will. This camera came into my collection as I was traveling the streets of Seoul. If you're unaware of the flea market scene in Seoul, Its enormous. I'd regularly frequent the market when I visited. The city attempted to contain this market by moving it inside, yet it was a futile effort. On the weekends, there would be blocks and blocks of people selling vintage everything Every street looked like this or this. A few streets down, I found this little guy. It had a roll of film, (Which I now know was only the backing paper of a roll of fujifilm) from the early 1950's.  

After quick inspection, I thought it was a great find, only later to realize the shutter lever had been snapped off. It took me several months to track down another one of these cameras in disrepair to harvest its parts.

The Fujimoto Semi Sport is a clone/ knock off of the zeiss folding cameras, much like the Kiev 66 is a Knockoff/ clone camera of a Hasseblad. It was nice shooting 6x645 format, since I tend to shoot square format in 120 film.

Here are a few images I shot not too long ago. I went to a park close to me.

Images shot on Fuji NPS 160.

I guess there was some debris left in the camera I didn't clean out... Created a pretty weird, but interesting image.