Lomography Monday: polaroid sx-70

Let me introduce you to our Polaroid SX-70 Land camera. We found it in a thrift shop in Spokane and I consider it one of our best treasures. I also want to find model 1 - it has a chrome body and tan leather cover. Ours is model 2. 

The Polaroid SX-70 is a folding single lens reflex (SLR) camera which was produced from 1972 to 1981. It folds down to be slim enough to carry in any bag or even a pocket! This camera doesn't require separate batteries, there's a disposable battery in every pack of film. SX-70 uses integral film at ISO 100. The original film for this camera is Polaroid "Time Zero." I found a pack on ebay and won it, but it didn't produce any photos - it had been expired for too long ago. It's safer (although more expensive) to go with the Impossible Project film like PX 70 and PX 100. 

This camera is really sensitive to lighting conditions. If you are shooting indoors your pictures might be blurry, and if it's very sunny the photos might be overexposed. The best condition for this camera is outdoor light on a cloudy day. You can adjust the exposure by rolling the black and white dial on the front of the camera. To lighten the resulting image, turn the roller toward white, to darken it, turn the roller toward black. At first we thought that "dark" meant that the scene was dark and "light" that it was too sunny.  With trial and error we figured this out. 

Here are the pictures that we took with the Polaroid SX-70.  The camera also allows you to focus manually. You look into the viewfinder and move the focusing wheel till you are satisfied with what you see. So in our pictures (although they didn't expose perfectly), you can see where it goes out of focus. We used PX 100 Silver Shade Cool. Once again my scanner was left in Russia, so these are just photos of the Polaroids.