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Welcome back to Dr. Love’s Tips, where Impossible USA’s camera resource manager Frank Love provides you with helpful tips and advice on how to get the best out of your Polaroid camera and Impossible film. This week: the importance of shielding…

For anyone who’s never heard of SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder, it is a disorder in which people can feel down…or SAD in the winter months of the year because there is far less light from the sun reaching us than there is in the warmer summer months. The lack of Vitamin D one gets from exposure to natural sunlight can affect one’s mood. Now, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Spring, and Summer is approaching, which means that, depending on the day and weather, there will be A LOT more light out there. This will make a lot of people happy, but it has the opposite effect on Impossible film. With Impossible film, there is another consideration, a different kind of reaction from exposure to sunlight.

First, it means you’ll likely need to do something that you may have stopped doing over the past few months if you’ve been shooting Color Protection (CP) film, and that’s shielding your photos from light. While the new CP formula is markedly better at resisting light in its opacification layer…it’s not 100% just yet.

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Welcome back to Dr. Love’s Tips, where Impossible USA’s camera resource manager Frank Love provides you with insight that allows you to get the best out of your Polaroid camera and Impossible film. This week: Shooting in Warm Weather…

It’s warming up again and even though we’ve touched on this topic before, it’s worth revisiting, for as the seasons have changed, so have our films.

Now everyone is surely familiar with our previous generation of COOL Films, but it’s possible that some haven’t yet shot our Color Protection films on those hot balmy summer days.

Just to start, whether it’s the COOL film or Color Protection film, the film is meant to be stored cool for best results. But, once you’re taking it out to shoot, you don’t need to keep the film at a refrigerated temperature. That said, if you’re going out on hot days, and plan to be outside for awhile, you will likely want to take some precaution so that the heat won’t affect the film.

There is one key difference to note between what you may be used to shooting (COOL color films and prior film generations), and the new Color Protection formula films. That being, COOL films when actually processing, would benefit from some extra warmth, giving the film a little boost in contrast and saturation. However, the new Color Protection formula does NOT react in the same way. The CPF films process best in those room temp/just below room temp conditions....Read All

A classic technique in which film is peeled apart and the front clear panel is dipped in warm water to free the emulsion layer from the plastic. These free-floating emulsions can then be placed on various papers or other materials, giving your photos a new shape.

Video by Tanja Deuß

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Welcome back to another edition of Dr. Love’s Tips, where Impossible USA’s camera resource manager Frank Love provides you with insight that allows you to get the best out of your Polaroid camera and Impossible film. This week: Viewfinder dysfunction…

Have you ever had the viewfinder on your SX-70 or SLR 680 suddenly go kind of…limp?

It’s ok, it can happen to 1 out of every 5 instant film shooters.

Symptoms can show themselves as:
1. a viewfinder that won’t fully close or open
2. what appears to be a black viewfinder when looking into it (see also: Mirror, Mirror blog post)
3. a small piece of metal sticking out the side of the skirt around the VF.

This can often be a simple issue in which the spring that hooks onto the mirror within the VF has come off the little bit of plastic on the mirror that it grabs to. So long as the piece of the mirror hasn’t broken, here’s a simple fix to put the spring back in place.

Welcome back to Dr. Love’s Tips! This week, Impossible USA’s Camera Resource Manager Frank Love discusses the SLR 680…

For any of you who happen to own an SLR 680, you know it is a beautifully well-crafted work of art of instant electronic machinery….it also tends to produce more ‘divots’ or [‘undeveloped patches’] than your friend’s SX-70 camera.

You may be wondering…why?

The simple answer here is the one thing in the ejection process that changes from the older SX-70 cameras to the SLR 680 and 690 model folding cameras, that is the rollers.