London Weather and Polaroid 55s
The weather in London tends to turn on you just when you do not want it
to. Fans of Wimbledon are well used to late June downpours, but the
windy squalls of the past two weeks are not exactly conducive to
photography either. I’ve recently started playing with some Polaroid
type 55 pos/neg film exposed in a 4"x5" pinhole camera. It takes some
getting used to, especially when using a defective Polaroid 545 holder.
The negative (iso 25) is rated at a different speed to the positive
(iso 100), so a good positive print means an underexposed negative. And
the negative itself is not as forgiving on poor exposure as Tri-X. The
negative must be washed in sodium sulphite and is very easy to scratch.
As evidenced in this photo, I’m still having the emulsion lift off
occasionally. The drying process introduces the practical problem of
dust since the negative is so huge (similar in actual size to what you
see onscreen here). Maybe it is better that the weather has been so
nasty, allowing me to nut all this out in the mundane confines of an
empty hallway. I have not yet worked out how I will manage this ‘in the
field’, the choice is to not peel-apart the film on location and risk a
poor result, or to incur the messy cost of sloshing chemicals on the
streets of paranoid fortress London. But fingers crossed, I should be
able to take some ‘real’ photos soon.
