Silverbased

As I’ve mentioned for many months, the end is near for Polaroid instant films. The company announced in February that all production was stopping; and the Enschede, Netherlands factory ceased operations on June 6th, 2008. (Although ironically, CNN only just discovered this story last week.)

All the factory equipment was subsequently auctioned off and scattered to the four winds—seemingly spelling doom for Polaroid integral films (meaning the most popular, squarish 600 format; and the rectangular Spectra/Image type).

Why is the Polaroid lady twisting her own head off her body?

Fujifilm continues to produce “peel-apart” instant films which are compatible with some Polaroid cameras and backs. Ironically this means certain 1960s Polaroid cameras will remain usable longer than the ubiquitous recent Polaroid OneStep and One600 models. (The 1960s cameras do require a weird-sized battery, however.)

Fuji also makes its own line of integral instant films called “Instax.” However Instax technology is completely different from Polaroid’s, and none of those films are compatible with any Polaroid camera.

To re-create Polaroid’s 600 film from scratch would be a complex and costly process (remember that each pack also contains a special flat battery). It’s doubtful Fujifilm would have a motive to take on that challenge, when they already makes a competing product. There are not many other players in the market with the technical expertise to revive integral film; so unless some mystery savior appears, we should assume 600 and Spectra are disappearing for good.

Earlier this year, the best deal I could find on 600 film was from OfficeDepot’s online store. However for many weeks there has been no more stock available to my Zip code; and anecdotally that seems to be true for other regions of the US too.

So this week I stopped off at a local Target store—in my area, this is the last bricks-and-mortar retailer with decent quantities of 600 remaining. I got two serious shocks: First, the price had been raised to US $17 a pack (yes, that’s $1.70 per photo); and second, the expiration date on the packs was “09/09.”

09/09 is the mark of the End Times

Why is that date significant? A group of Dutch Flickr members toured the Enschede factory in May, two weeks before it shut down; and the date code they saw on finished packs was 09/09. Note that this is actually later than the “Aug 09″ final expiration date listed in Polaroid’s own phase-out announcement.

Apparently there may have been one final week’s production stamped with the expiration date “10/09.” Packs with that date are now available at the European “PolaPremium” website.

This new operation has made a splash selling small batches of various unusual Polaroid films, produced in the factory’s final days. (Some have questioned whether these special products were simply a way to use up old or substandard chemistry. I have no firsthand experience with these films; and considering the shipping charges to the USA, I don’t plan to try them.)

In any case, the message to Polaroid fans is clear. If you see packs with the date code 09/09, assume it’s your last chance to buy them. Ever.

(Well okay. I’m sure gouging profiteers on eBay will have packs to sell for the next few years—but at grossly inflated prices.)

So look deep within your soul (and your bank balance), and decide what it’s worth to you, to save a few final packs for special occasions.

Remember that the life of Polaroid films can be extended a few years past their expiration date by keeping them in the fridge. (Don’t put them in the freezer, because you can wreck the vital developer goo pods which form the image.)

Expired Polaroid film can lend interesting quirks to an image, due to color shifts and fading; or the image can be streaked or incompletely developed. But once film packs are many years out of date, they begin to fail entirely. Batteries die, or the developer pods dry out.

So don’t go hoarding more film than you would shoot in the next 2-3 years. You would just be taking precious shots away from another Polaroid-lover, who might be able to use it.

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Update 19 Dec. 2008: Just as I posted this, the Polaroid corporation announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The reasons have little to do with instant photography; but the company’s troubles make the future of the Polaroid brand even murkier.

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Update February 2009: Yes, I have heard the excited talk about The Impossible Project to restart integral film production. It turns out some of the essential factory equipment was saved after all. I will be curious to see how it pans out. Here’s a good podcast radio interview with the technical head of the project.

Remember, they have numerous engineering hurdles to overcome before any film reaches shelves; once it does, it’s likely to be “quirky” emulsions at high prices.

The word “bokeh” is the Japanese word for blurry; and based on skimming Flickr comments recently, it seems to be the buzzword of the moment in photography circles. There’s a puzzle, though. Since English already has the word “blur,” why did anyone feel a need to start using the Japanese one? It’s also odd for the word to be transliterated with a final ‘h’; after all, we write sake and not sakeh.

I had been taking photographs for over 30 years before ever hearing the term; and at first it confused me too. However it turns out that bokeh refers to quite a specific aspect of lens blur—calling attention to subtle phenomena that might otherwise be overlooked.

Unfortunately though, the meaning of “bokeh” has been getting rather blurred itself lately. We ought to make a stand to preserve its specific technical meaning, before this useful term degenerates into just another name for “fuzzy.”

A corny flower shot shows nice bokeh from a rotten plastic lens (on a vintage Diana)

Now don’t get me wrong—photographs which use selective focus to give nicely blurred backgrounds can be very pleasing. I like this effect, and have written about how to get it. And because many of today’s digital cameras limit your ability to achieve this look, a photo with shallow focus and a creamy blurred background will often attract many admiring comments about “great bokeh!”

But bokeh is NOT a synonym for “blurry background,” or “shallow depth of field.” It actually has little to do with the amount of blur. The degree of blur you see in out-of-focus areas is essentially a function of geometry—the relationship between the aperture’s diameter and its distance from the subject. Lets say you’re taking a portrait from 4 feet away using a 50mm lens at f/4. Every brand and every design of 50mm lens will render the background with the same amount of blur. But to the connoisseur, two different lenses may yield violently different bokeh.

Bokeh refers to the subjective quality of the blur. Is it “jangly” and busy-looking, or creamy and smooth? Do out-of-focus highlights have odd, distracting shapes, or are they unobtrusive circles? Does the blurred area seem to “swirl” around the center of the photo in arcs? These are some of the factors which might be mentioned as aspects of the bokeh for a particular lens. And these may be the reasons why a serious bokeh geek would chose one particular lens over a different brand with otherwise identical specs.

The word “bokeh” officially entered the English language in 1997, in an issue of the magazine Photo Techniques—whose editor Mike Johnston decided to add the final ‘h’ to make the pronunciation less ambiguous. He tells the story here, and includes some interesting photos showing different subjective effects in various blurred backgrounds.

Where does Bokeh come from?

But WHY might different lenses have different bokeh signatures? Well, there are two effects.

Each point of light from an unfocused area of the subject forms an extended bright patch at the image plane. Conventionally we call this a ‘blur disk,’ as if these were always circular; but really the blur spot takes on the same shape as the lens’s aperture stop. If the diaphragm blades form a 6- or 8-sided “stop-sign” shape (as SLR lenses typically do), so will the blur spot.

A most extreme example of this happens with mirror telephoto lenses, which have a central obstruction: Their blur disks are fuzzy doughnuts. This creates exceptionally distracting bokeh, if there are pinpoint highlights to accentuate it.

This crop from an Olympus XA shot shows busy diamond-pattern bokeh, matching the shape of the camera’s simple 2-blade aperture stop

Also, if a lens’s barrel design obstructs the more oblique light rays, the effective aperture opening becomes progressively more football-shaped towards the corners of the frame. This often leads to a “swirly” background effect if the lens is used at wide apertures.

The other issue has to do with a subtlety of optical design; namely, whether the blurred light ends up more concentrated at the middle of the blur disk or at its edges. A bright rim to the blur disk generally leads to distracting, jangly-patterned bokeh. But note that this effect often reverses depending on whether the subject is in front or behind of the focus point.

Both these effects are discussed in much detail in this excellent article (it is actually one of the original 1997 Photo Techniques articles mentioned above).

A blur disk with the light concentrated more towards its center will generally lead to smoother, creamier bokeh—and ironically one way to achieve this is to create a lens design which leaves some uncorrected spherical aberration. That compromises overall sharpness, so lens designers usually avoid it.

But there have been some specialized soft-focus lenses manufactured that exploit the effect; and it’s the reason why a plastic piece-of-junk camera often gives such dreamily smooth blur where the subject is out of focus, like in the Diana daisies shot I posted above.

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Update: This page from Rick Denny compares the bokeh from several lenses of similar focal lengths; it illustrates very well how differently each renders out-of-focus highlights (scroll down the page to the photographs).