December 2009

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Tan is the new black

December 31, 2009 in photography | 2 comments

Tan SX70 Alpha 1

So…after realising that my black and silver SX70 Sonar was not going to be an easy repair job, I decided to bite the pillow and buy a replacement. I probably umm’ed and ahhh’d for a good two months. Firstly you have to wade through the many SX70 lots on eBay that are listed as “not sure if it works but it used to in 1978 when my Grandad used it last”…which seemed to be most of them. There were also a few lots which were re-listed with suspicious regularity; this suggested to me that a buyer received it only to discover it no longer worked and sent it back. I almost bought one from PolaPremium, but refuse to pay the inflated prices. In the end I bought a very pretty tan leather SX70 Alpha 1 (manual focus), deciding that a sonar autofocus model would add to the list of things that might go wrong with it.

Two design icons

It came with a very nice leather carrying case, the strap of which broke the moment I put it on. Luckily the camera wasn’t damaged in the drop. I tested it with the remaining film salvaged from the old Sonar:

Found Toy

Incidentally, I finally got around to scanning the last Polaroids that I managed to take with the old SX70. Briefly in August it started working again for a few hours, long enough to take some photos at Steve’s birthday party. When it came to taking my self portrait, the SX70 died for a second and last time…I’m trying not to take it personally:

August Picnic

Goodbye SX70 Sonar…I will miss you

RIP

Tags: polaroid

Labour in vain

December 31, 2009 in photography | No comments

It’s official – I can’t save my beloved black and silver Polaroid SX70 Sonar camera :(

One day last year, on inserting a fresh film pack, the motor just kept running and would not stop, even after ejecting the cardboard dark slide. I’d read that this was a fairly common affliction and was due to a snapped plastic shaft that attaches to the motor. The repair is quite simple and involves opening the camera up and reattaching one of the springs in lieu of the shaft (see here for details).

The first hurdle was actually getting the SX70 open. The base plate is covered by a sheet of aluminium (covered in leatherette) which you must remove to get at the screws underneath – it’s glued on pretty tight and it’s quite easy to wreck the covering getting it off. That’s when I discovered that the screwheads were a non-standard 1mm square:

That funny little screw

I looked everywhere online and searched my local Maplins store top to bottom, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit. Apparently most SX70s are assembled using star-shaped Torx screws, but my mine was one of the very few held together with non-standard square-head screws. My friend Ben, a sculptor, came to the rescue and filed down an Allen key to make me a bespoke screwdriver small enough to undo the screws!

DIY screwdriver

Aaaaarrgghhh! To heap Pelion on Ossa, the moment I opened the casing I found this:

Drive shaft repair (circled)

That was the repair that I was about to make, and someone had got there first! You can see clearly that the end of the screw has been poked into a little slot on the drive shaft coming from the motor. If the problem wasn’t solved by this repair, then it can only mean that something else was wrong (most likely costly gear damage). I had to admit defeat, my beloved SX70 Sonar was kaput…

Dead SX70

Tags: polaroid

In Search of an Aurora

December 24, 2009 in photography | 1 comment

November saw us flying to Tromsø in Norway to fulfil a longtime ambition to see the Aurora Borealis. I’d visited Scandinavia in when I stayed in Ljusdal, Sweden, but that was Midsummer and the opposite side of the solar cycle. This time dusk, not daylight, reigned.

There’s something very beautiful about twilight; not just the temperature of the light – the muzzy blues and drowsy mauves – but one is so used to the fleeting nature of it, that by the time you’ve really started to appreciate the moment, it’s gone.

This far North (the furthest North I’ve ever been) the twilight lasts for several hours, and it’s not long before it starts to play tricks on the eye and mind. There’s a charged sort of clarity to the landscape that you get with day-for-night scenes in films, like the shadows and edges are too sharp for such a late, fuzzy hour. But it can’t be; I look at the time and it’s only 3 o’clock in the afternoon, but every sense in my body ignores this fact and promptly initiates a midnight shut-down. Drinking a cup of coffee in a little wooden cafe nestled in the mountains and fjells is all I can do to stay awake.

This was the first time I’ve shot exclusively on digital; for practical reasons. If there was going to be any Aurora activity, I wanted to know there and then if the shot was successfully recorded – after all this was a rare opportunity. With the luxury of hindsight I would now have taken medium format film as well. The Nikon D200 is a nice bit of kit but I reckon good old-fashioned slide film is made for the light out there.

Taxi rank, Tromsø town centre – about 3 pm

We were fortunate to be looked after during our stay by Per Helge and Trond Håvard, who were very generous with their time and brimming with local knowledge. I have happy memories of being driven at daredevil speed by Trond Håvard in his rattling, Sherman tank of a van through valleys and up hills; waving at live deer, and clinging on for dear life…silently I thanked the inventor of seatbelts!

The tank!

We also got a private guided tour around the Tromsø Museum and the local art school, Kunstakadamiet i Tromsø. Towards the end of the week, we were invited to Per Helge’s apartment for dinner and conversation and baffled him by photographing his very photogenic kitchen post-meal.

As is always the way, we later found out there was a short spike of Aurora activity while we were indoors. Most likely it would have been too weak to see so we probably didn’t miss anything. Yes, I’m afraid we didn’t see one glimmer of the Northern Lights. The nearest was an artificial recreation of the Aurora Machine in the Tromsø Museum. I wish we’d been able to turn the real Aurora on with the press of a button…