Polaroid filtered multiexposure

Aleksandra, double

Model: Aleksandra

The Impossible Project PX600 Black Frame Poor Pod UV+

Polaroid Land Camera 1000 with ND Filter

Today I’m here to tell you about some other experimentation I did on instant film and Polaroid camera. When I was really a beginner with polas, I wanted to do some double exposure shots but I just didn’t know how to do it. Instead of looking for a tutorial I preferred to figure it out by myself. The first thing I did was damn stupid, no, rather naïve I’d say: after taking the first shot, I put the picture back on the top of the pack and shot again. I didn’t think about the exposure from of the picture outside of the camera but most important I had no clue about how the chemistry cycle of one picture is. The result was a totally burned shot by the way, on The Impossible Project PX 70 PUSH! film if I remember well. I realized that the only solution was to do all the exposures before the film could be ejected from the camera. For some film storage reasons I was pretty good at inserting blackslide or similar stuff at the top of a film pack before pulling it off from a camera so I could switch between different film using a single camera, and there came the idea: I had to put something at the top of the film pack that could be ejected instead of the picture without forcing the camera’s mechanism and letting the picture being exposed at the same time. Let’s use a transparent film then! I cut out a Polaroid sized rectangle of acetate (transparent film) and I tried using it at the top of the pack. It kind of worked! The first attempt were burned blank photos because I forgot to reduce the exposure time, which I obviously had to do since I was exposing twice a single film. But before managing to shot a decent picture another idea came to my mind: what if the transparent film is not completely transparent? Which particular result could I achieve playing with positive-negative shapes or patterns? And there I was, printing different masks on acetate.

The picture at the top of this post is actually the very first shot with this technique. Successful! I did some other shots like this but the process was pretty slow and hard, the risk of light leaks was very high and for some reasons different times it happened that things went just wrong and the camera got completely stuck and stuff. I haven’t found a better way to do it, but one day I will, or if you have any tip or suggestion just leave a comment.

Here are some other shots, some good and other big failure ;)