picture(s) a day - oct 19

Last night, randomly, I got a notification about a picture of mine on Flickr that hit the Explore page.

It was surprising and puzzling because a) I took this picture a year or more ago, b) it's not that interesting of a picture, IMO, compared to other Explore pictures, c) I'd rather people go to the original Polaroid photos (several are uploaded to Flickr) and make them hit the Explore page instead of these binder pages. 😝

Anyway, I didn't further think anything of it, chalking it up to a weird algorithm. But this morning I saw an e-mail about Fall "'Roid Week" starting today, and I understood, kind of, what happened with the above picture. People maybe were searching for Polaroid pictures and happened upon this. I still don't know why it was deemed interesting enough for Explore, but I at least have a sense of how it sort of got there.

I busted out some of my Instax Mini monochrome film stash and loaded it into my Diana F+ since it's the only camera I have that shoots Instax Mini, and tried to take a few shots to acclimate myself to the camera again. And then this happened:

WTH?? Apparently the pod of film chemicals exploded and leaked, smearing all over any frame that was ejected. GREAT!

I realized this film was super expired, best by date of 2020, so I guess that's why the film exploded and wasn't even developing (for the frames that actually spread the chemicals within the frame properly). Sheesh. Normally super old film just doesn't develop. But I guess this year it decided to go to the next level of expiredness. 🙄

I had to shove some paper into the ejection slot multiple times to sop up the black goo that had accumulated after I tested a few more frames of the expired film. I tried to eject more dead frames, hoping they would get rid of the excess goo, but that didn't really work, so I switched to using scratch paper.

At least this frame has an interesting film development error:

I found a pack of Instax Mini color film that will actually develop properly (well, at least one frame did), so hopefully the rest of 'Roid Week will go a bit more smoothly. 🤞 Note to self: buy newer Instax and Polaroid film!