There are areas of photography that are revered by many photographers, two of them are medium format and Polaroid. However, combining the two has become tremendously expensive in recent years. Perhaps now there's a solution.
I have a well-documented love affair with medium format. Some of it — possibly a lot of it — isn't overly logical, but I love it all the same. In the last few years, I have dipped my toe into something else that interested me and the other side of today's coin: Polaroid. I was lent a Leica Sofort and while it wasn't perhaps the best example of instant photography, it was endearing. Then my girlfriend's family found their original Polaroid similar to the famed SX-70 and I fell deeper still.
However, the idea of shooting medium format square Polaroids is very enticing indeed. It was a popular way of shooting, both creatively and for testing purposes, during the film era and Fujifilm has an adored film type called the FP-100C which was discontinued in 2016. As with all discontinued film types that are loved, their price rocketed, and now even expired packs of 10 shots will cost you $70 or more. In this video, George of NegativeFeedback experiments with a cheaper way using a Zinstax Polaroid back for the Mamiya RZ67 which can use Instax film at a much cheaper price per shot. If you want to see a video showing exactly how it all works, here you are:
Why would you even want to do this?
Let's see...
- It's cheaper than pack film
- More reliable than polaroid film (colors/consistency)
- A different format to shoot on your RZ67
- Oh yea, and the most important, it's fun.
usually, when you are working with large, or semi-large (mamiya 6x7 is a BIG kit), it is for exposure verification and composition verification . . . why would I want to do that on postage stamp size "pix" of really questionable quality . . . oh yeah . . . another ftopperist who can't get a job and has to write up some worthless click-bait . . . how foolish of me not to have seen that.
Instax is in fact quite good medium, so when you pair it with fully controllable quality camera like this, you can create really cool pieces of art.