The Incredible Quality of Polaroid Black and White Film

While we're on the subject of Polaroid photos and how the black and white exposures stacked up against output from the best cameras at the time, I delved into my own archives -- er, well, more than a shoebox of photos, but not a great filing system either.

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These next three photos were taken at about the same time as the one of my son with a Red Sox cap and a baseball glove. There's better definition but I don't see more tonal values. The film was Polaroid 4x5 film, probably Type 52 if I recall, in a Polaroid 4x5 back on a modest Calumet 4x5 camera on a tripod in natural light, indoors, against a painted backdrop of composition board.

 

Here's another shot under the same conditions of my daughter alone.

And still another. You may wonder why I include photos which were not taken with an off-the-shelf Polaroid Land Camera. It's because so much of Polaroid's advertising was shot by professional photographers who used the same 4x5 film in Polaroid 4x5 backs on expensive view cameras such as Sinars, Linhofs, and lowly catalog items like Calumets. 

Having shown you all that, now look at the next photo.

 

This WAS taken with an off-the-shelf even lowlier Polaroid Land Camera, Model 100 with plain vanilla black and white pack film. Check out the range of grays, and look at the detail, below.

 

And for comparison, here's a conventional photo taken on Kodak Plus X with a Hasselblad Superwide and all the tonal range captured  by a professional lab and printed with the best equipment available. 

The subject is sculptor Joyce Johnson of North Truro on Cape Cod, taken in 1981 and recently shown in a retrospective exhibition of my photos at the Cape Cod Museum of Art.

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