The most striking thing about the I-1 is its look and feel. It’s compact, it’s light, and it is gorgeous. The matte-black finish gives it the high-touch look of an Apple product, and it also makes it really comfortable to hold. My favorite part of the slick design might be the camera’s pop-up viewfinder, even though I never used it much. It snaps into the top of the camera satisfyingly with three small, strong magnets. (One thing that could be changed, though, is the on / off switch, which appears in the form of a ring around the shutter, and is far too easy to accidentally switch on.)
Other instant cameras on the market, like Fujifilm’s popular Instax series, have the most basic controls — your only option is typically an indoor or outdoor setting, maybe a flash if you’re lucky. And the I-1 can operate in this straightforward manner if you want it to.
There’s a three-step switch on the right side of the lens that lets you under or overexpose your photo (or keep it neutral), and a switch for the flash on the opposite side. The shutter sits on the right side of the camera and has two stages: half-press to focus and full-press to shoot. It’s a fairly simple camera to pick up and figure out, and this could be your entire experience with the I-1, if you like.
But the reason people will want to spend $299 on the I-1 is what lies beneath that surface layer of interaction. While other mashups of old and new often feel forced — like the semi-digital 8mm film camera that Kodak announced at CES this past year — the Impossible Project officiated this marriage smartly. There's not so many connected features that the I-1 feels like a digital camera, but the new stuff that is there changes the experience for the better.
Inside the camera is a Bluetooth radio that allows the camera to pair to your phone, letting you to fiddle with the manual controls in a way that’s not previously been possible with instant film cameras. In fact, aside from loading the film cartridges, the app is capable enough that you could get by never touching the I-1’s physical controls.
The I-1 has a beautiful, striking designIn the app — which is iPhone only for now, an Android version is slated for later this year — you can pick from a wide range of apertures (f10 to f64) and turn the exposure time up all the way to 30 seconds. There are modes that let you use your phone as a remote trigger, you can perform double exposures, set a timer, and do long-exposure light painting.
I’m not a Polaroid buff, but going in, I thought this deep level of control would sell me on the I-1. While I like the point-and-shoot nature of some other instant cameras, their basic settings (apertures typically locked to f8 or f11, for example) require excellent lighting conditions. I like to tinker and experiment when I shoot on digital cameras, so I’ve always craved more control when I’ve picked up something like the Fujifilm Instax Wide.
So for a while, the I-1 scratched that itch. I shot from the hip, but I also used the app to plan out more complicated shots. For example, I was able to set the camera up on a bar, rack the shutter time up to 15 seconds, and take a long exposure from a few stools away. That’s not some sort of revolutionary photographic concept — you can do that with any digital camera and even your phone — but there was an inherent thrill about finally being able to do it with a camera that immediately produces a physical version of the picture you just took.
For one, the camera eschews the typical focus method found on cheaper instant cameras — physical buttons or knobs with icons of a human, a tree, or a row of trees to represent subjects that are increasingly far away. Instead, the I-1 implores you to use the half-press shutter autofocus. You can hear (and feel) the parts moving when you do this, and most of my photos looked approximately in focus, but the results never inspired confidence.
Nailing the exposure was similarly wonky. The camera is supposed to automatically expose the photo if you’re just running and gunning, and you can toggle through the three exposure settings on the lens to compensate.
The app also has an exposure tool in manual mode. But my results were all over the map, no matter which method I used to calculate exposure. I’d flip the switch to try to underexpose a bright scene of buildings and sky and still wind up with a washed-out image. And I had even less luck with the long exposure images: many of them turned out woefully dark, even though the app was telling me that there was more than enough light for a 10-, 15-, or 30-second exposure. The I-1 may have a fancy coat of paint and some modern connectivity, but under the hood, it’s still very much an instant camera in the Polaroid style.
These problems felt abnormally hard to solve because of the 20–30 minute processing time for each photo. Since Impossible Project had to recreate Polaroid’s chemical processes from scratch, the company decided to change a few steps to make the film a bit more environmentally friendly.
The end result, though, is that the film is less stable, and you can get through an entire episode of Parks & Recreation before you know whether you got the exposure or focus right, or if you even framed up the shot correctly. What’s worse, even when I could nail the focus and exposure, a handful of of prints showed cracking along the edges.
Another problem is the way the I-1 communicates information to the user. There are eight lights that make up the ring flash around the lens, and they’re supposed to be able to communicate the number of photos remaining. The camera doesn’t magically count the photos left in each cartridge — it just illuminates all eight lights when you load a new pack of film and counts down from there. For reasons beyond me, this process got disrupted a few times while I was using the I-1, and so I wound up exposing film because I removed a cartridge too soon.
With enough time, you could probably zero in on these problems; learning how to compensate for things like inconsistent focusing, or a light meter’s tendency to lean one way or another, is often part of the deal when it comes to getting comfortable with cameras. I had just three packs of film to play around with, though, so I often felt like I was shooting a bit blind.
That’s a real problem for casual photographers who might lust for the I-1. You’ll have to spend a lot of time using the I-1 to get the most out of it, which is fine, as long as you’re okay knowing that experimentation won’t come cheap.
The camera starts at $300, the compatible film packs run $20 or more, and you only get eight shots per pack. That’s about $2.50 per exposure, and I was failing at a rate of about one in three shots in my brief time using it.
If you’re new to instant film, or you just like the aesthetic of it, you’re probably better off going the cheaper, more accessible route. You’ll probably have less control over the camera, but you’ll be able to acquaint yourself with the format and produce more consistent results without burning through a paycheck.
But if you’re new to instant film then the Impossible I-1 isn’t for you, anyway. More than anything, it's a new toy for photographers who have spent months or years shooting on this type of film, because they're the ones who are most familiar with the inherent pains of being a Polaroid shooter, and the joy that comes from getting it right.
0 comments:
Post a Comment