Last week I found a Polaroid 600 instant camera in the Davis Sq. flea market. The film is not made anymore, nor are many of the chemicals needed to make it. The Impossible Project stepped in when Polaroid was shutting down, obtaining one of its old factories and equipment, and attempted to recreate the film. It’s an ongoing development as they can’t quite reproduce some of the many chemicals that are squeezed onto instant film to develop it and as a result, it is very sensitive to light, temperature, and humidity—requiring some care as soon as it is ejected from the camera. I picked up some Impossible color and black & white film this week to try it, and despite the trouble, it’s still fun!

I sold my Olympus E-P1 and replaced it with the new Panasonic LX7, it’s much more portable and has a great f1.4 lens. I shoot RAW on my cameras, and the smaller sensor size of the LX7 benefits even more from this. Turning to my typical models (my dogs), I put it to the test, temporarily setting the camera to save both a RAW and a JPEG of each photo.

These first two shots are zoomed to 100%, and have identical minimal default processing applied with Lightroom. Note how the jpeg portion loses a ton of detail and unnatural-looking unsharp filtering as compared to the raw portion of each photo:

Another advantage to RAW is the fact that it contains information well beyond the dynamic range of a jpeg. Here I was playing by mounting my huge Canon flash to the top, which fired at 100% and massively overexposed the photo. The JPEG is a throwaway. But with the RAW, a few simple adjustments bring back much of the blown-out picture and a improperly exposed photo is saved: