You were either there or you weren’t, I was, I was of an age when Polaroid cameras, at least here in Britain seemed like something new. Funnily enough the results of instant polaroid shots were invariably of another age, the hues, the colours, the tones that this technology captured (or rather misrepresented) did something very strange to photography, it imbued everything from a test shot of a super model to a family day out on the beach with a strange and timeless quality hardly seen since the phasing out of sepia.

Here are a few Warhol celebrity photos to give you an idea of what I mean, there’s no chance of an airbrush or a Photoshop wizard working their trickery on these, they were taken, they developed and here are the results:-

It’s almost as if technology has gone too far these days, for instance the amount of movie directors who openly speak out against CGI animation, it’s cold, hard and lifeless. The same can be said for much of digital photography, something is missing, a warmth, a randomness of result so lacking these days. Nothing is left to chance, there are no mistakes, and if there are they can be erased. A chemical process is more likely to surprise, the chaos chemistry of liquid and light, digitisation is orderly, it must be manipulated after the event to create anything but a stilted reportage confined within the boundaries of good technology.

I received an email the other day from Maurice Sikkink at www.Rollip.com who invited me to come over and try out their polarisation site, they offer a range of interesting and unique filters to polarise any image you require. I played around for a while and came up with a few of my own. The first is just a holiday snap from Google Images.

I played around with a few other images, there are a wide selection of filters, exposures and effects at Rollip and you have the choice of maintaining your image size or reducing it to a Polaroid format. I’ve seen this kind of application before but I have to admit Rolip have put extra effort into giving far more options for customization and better quality effects, and the online format makes it much easier to share pictures across the social web. Why not try processing your entire collection?

Try out your own at www.Rollip.com

This post is tagged Polaroid, polaroid camera, polaroid images, vintage photography