Old Polaroid film

Before this years EF, Lance, a great friend from the US asked me if I’d like to have some Polaroid Spectra film as he wouldn’t use it anymore. Of course it was expired film, as there is no non-expired original Polaroid film anymore and he told me the batteries would most likely be dead.

Today, I gave it a try with a pack that expired in 2007. Hoping that the battery would still have enough juice, I put the pack in and.. the camera made a desperate try on pushing the darkslide out. Well, the battery was pretty dead.

Soo, what to do.. I did have another empty Spectra film pack, but that one also contained an almost empty battery. What I did have were a dozen of Impossible batteries from SX-70 film packs. So I took the empty Spectra cartdride, removed the polaroid battery and tried to put in the Impossible battery. It didn’t really fit, so I had to make some adjustments with scissors. The next challenge was to put all the undeveloped photos from one cartridge into the other, so once again (I did this too often) I went to my bathroom, closed the door, went under a blanket and somehow managed to get all the photos into the other cartridge.

Well, should work now, right? Well, not really. The darkslide got pushed out, but the next photo was stuck.

Eventually I gave up on that photo and decided to look at it, turns out that the developed dried out and the photo was too stiff and bent to be pushed out. So I removed it.. next one.. the same. I was about to give up on this pack as I expected everything to be dried out, but the next photo looked better, and it actually kind of worked! Of course it was all white since I exposed it completely.

The next photo of my brothers dog that I’m currently dog-sitting worked however, it just has a very weird big blue part (no, that’s not a reflection) where apparently the negative and the positive touched and apparently over the years reacted in a strange way. Anyway, I’m super happy I can take photos now with this film, imperfections like that make it even more interesting 🙂

Thanks again to Lance for being super nice and giving me this for playing around with!

Parts of the Spectra filmpack, the white battery is the original Polaroid battery.
Parts of the Spectra filmpack, the white battery is the original Polaroid battery.
The resulting photos!
The resulting photos!
A close up of the first working photo.
A close up of the first working photo.

1 thought on “Old Polaroid film”

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