The camera is a routine thing nowadays. But once upon a time, 30 years back a camera was one of the most precious possessions in our house. It was a Polaroid camera - the type that gives instant hard copy photoes.
We now have digital cameras that are much easy to operate, process and finally print; with the most advanced features and intuitive ease of use. Those days cameras were a rarity, and Polaroid cameras an extreme rarity.
In the modern world polaroid cameras are still used by the police, detectives and health personnel for its capacity to produce instant documentation, on paper of course, though very rarely, and based on unusual requirements.
Well this Polaroid camera, my father bought from an Anglo Indian who could ill afford to spend money on the film cartridges it required to be loaded for each shot, and the films were to be available no where in most parts of India those days.
One day I had a brainstorm and decided to request my uncle in Oman to send us a couple of film cartridges(each could be used for only one shoot), which he agreed to do so. However, out of the dozen he sent each time(which were imported all the way from the US), half of them invariably turned out to be damaged of mishandling by postal/ custom authorities.
So my father became an expert Polaroid cameraman and we had our childhood memories saved for eternity in insta-color(I just made up that word, excuse me). You took the snap, waited for a manual timer on the camera to run, and at the appropriate time pulled out the cartridge, separated the negative from the snap, wait for it to dry for a few minutes, and hey, pronto, you had the snap on paper ready to be put in an album. The negative contained lethal poison and had to be carefully disposed off.
I think the proliferation of cameras today has its advantages as well as its bad points. On one hand photography has been made so easy that we shoot anything and everything. Out of a 100 digital shots I guess only 30% of them are really worth preserving. On top of this the tediousness of separating the good ones from the bad ones forces us to preserve all of them, maybe write them on a CD, and forget them.
But when you took each photo in those good old days, every photograph mattered, and was taken with great care and diligence, and of course they were carefully preserved!
I know of a friend who took several thousand photoes at an event, but half of them turned out to be in bad light, but since he didn't have the patience to separate the good ones, he simply wrote it onto a CD which he finally disposed with the trash.
So now we have a battle between quantity versus quality, and quantity is winning, at the cost of quality.
The most wonderful thing about Polaroid snaps to us as kids was that it gave instant gratification. You pointed, carefully shot and the paper version was in you hands in about 3 minutes! It was nothing less than magic to us then!
When I learnt a bit of science in my later years, I appreciated the fact that Polaroid cameras used very complex technology using the physical phenomenon of light polarization and the chemical properties of light sensitive compounds.
Now that very camera lies unused, in a dusty corner of a cupboard (still under lock and key) since newer verions of Polaroid cameras have emerged, the films are available in India, but alas the film cartridges for our outdated camera is out of production. I had often nursed the dream of using that very camera when I grew up, but well, all good things must come to an end.
The cute photo you see by the side is that of my youngest bro(here) with a toothless grin, taken with the Polaroid camera when he was just around three.
