I've always loved photography. It probably comes from my artistic background when I studied fine arts at the university in my previous life (in this life, I studied computer sciences and become a true geek). When MKO Games closed, I joined DxO Labs, a company working on image quality. Everyday at work, I try to enhance the windows version of Optics Pro, a software that does a pretty good job at fixing your images.

It funny to see that one of the things I like the most in photography is so far from what I'm doing in my day job: instant photography.

Re-introducing the Polaroid 1000

One day, I've had the chance to find my dad's polaroid 1000 camera and since then I've always wanted to make it work and have a few instant polaroids developed with it.

What was nearly impossible a few years ago if you were not one of those crazy lucky guys to have stored your old polaroid films in perfect condition in your freezer became a reality thanks to The Impossible Project.

Those guys managed to produce polaroid films from scratch (you can read the whole story here) allowing me to revive this sexy little polaroid 1000 of mine.

It's sure that the film is not cheap at all (count 24 USD for 8 pictures) and that taking a good picture is incredibly difficult in this try-fail-and-try-again world of digital photography, but the reward is so enormous when you manage to take a shot that is well lit, well composed and properly focused that you quickly forget that it cost you 3 USD.

Diana F+ & Fuji Instax = Instant Lomography

In the quest of eventually finding a cheaper alternative to the costly polaroid 1000 films, I found that Lomography was editing an accessory for the popular Diana F+ camera that allowed it to take instant pictures using Fuji Instax films.

The end result is pretty unexpected but it has a killer look, and when you master it, you can take pretty awesome shots.

It has an advantage over the Polaroid 1000 camera, that you can control the aperture, the focus and the exposure time which allows you to do pretty cool things.

The main differences concern both the size of the shots (Fuji Instax are credit-card size while Polaroid 1000 are almost two times bigger) and the colors which are pretty different between the two films.

Conclusion

I love so much those two cameras than I can't travel without them. I usually bring them in my bag as well as 1 film pack for the Polaroid 1000 and 2 or 3 film packs of Fuji Instax in addition to my classic digital camera.