picture(s) a day: oct 22

Polaroid Week, Fall 2025, day 4

Last night on a whim I decided to resurrect my Impossible I-1 to try it out for this Polaroid Week. At first it didn't seem to be charging, but after a while the charging light did come on...phew.

I just felt like, after shooting with my old Polaroid Land Camera and the Diana F+ which is a 120 film camera with an Instax back, I wanted the experience of shooting a modern Polaroid camera that isn't my Polaroid Go. And since I have the I-1 laying around, why not get it going for 'Roid Week?

I don't think I actually shot many pictures with this camera when I first got it. I think the film at that time was a little bit less consistent and more fiddly. The company was still early, known as The Impossible Project, not yet the reborn Polaroid. I don't remember if that really was the reason I bought the camera and quickly "churned" out of using it.

Earlier today I picked up a double pack of Polaroid I-type film from Best Buy and stopped at Cupertino Memorial Park to take some test shots. I wish I would've taken some pictures of the images before they fully developed, because some of the "transitional states" looked really interesting, kind of surreal colors and lighting.

While I have several images I intend sharing from this short "photo walk", here's my chosen first picture for today:

I think this was an accidental double exposure because when I first tried taking the photo, the film didn't eject. I wasn't sure if that's actually what happened after I pressed the shutter, but looking at the shot afterwards, it appears that might've been the case. I like the quality of the sunlight peeking through the branches.

My second photo is from the Diana F+, from yesterday's photo walk:

You know I love me a cloudy sky with some accessory trees. 😀

It's really hard to only post 2 images per day, per the Flickr 'RoidWeek2025 group rules, as I got a lot of shots from the I-1 that I liked. The only thing that annoyed me about it was that it wasn't fully ejecting the film. It would stop maybe 3/4 of the way through, forcing me to aggressively yank the frame out. A quick search led to a Reddit thread where someone mentioned they had a problem with the film not ejecting properly, in their case, not at all. Apparently there might be a known issue with the electronics malfunctioning in these older cameras, which is not cool. So I'm not sure how long this camera has before it stops ejecting the film properly at all. 🫤

I will post more pictures after the end of Polaroid Week, as they're too good not to share.