But what's rarer than all that is this pack of Polaroid 691 film for colorgraph overhead projection, as it says on the pack. Go back with me to the days before powerpoint and scanning stuff in and hastily throwing them together in a word doc for your next pitch and journey back to the mid-90's or earlier. With this film and your great overhead projector, you could photograph all your great talking points and really wow the room with full-color slides. I wonder what the pitch success rate was with this film, or if many folks used it. This box I got on ebay for a tidy sum expired in 1997 and the sticker on the back says they were discontinuing this film as of '98.
I've been sitting on this film for a few months now, waiting for something great to photograph that would seem worthy of its unique, possibly last-pack-on-the-earth greatness. After a while I just couldn't wait any longer and got the itch to load it up in my Land Camera Automatic 100 and fire away. Below is the first shot of some prairie restoration at North Mississippi Regional Park near my house on the northside of Minneapolis. It looks like the emulsion is already starting to dry up, but we'll see how the rest of the pack goes. It's hard to decide what to shoot when you know that these are the only 8 shots you're every going to get. If you've got any ideas, send them my way.
Thus, this is the great film-shooters dilemma. We have these great expired Polaroid films and want to save them for eternity, but if we wait too long, they'll just dry up and be unusable, their great potential never realized. Stay tuned, I'll post what becomes of the rest of the pack both here and on my Flickr page.
