Sir William sug­gested that I keep the pic­tures comin’, so in accor­dance with the No-Lameness Pol­icy, I decided that this would be a fine week­end to exe­cute Oper­a­tion Polaroid on Polaroid.

Unfor­tu­nately, I was chased out of the World Cap­i­tal of Instant Pho­tog­ra­phy by the Polaroid cav­alry only moments after tak­ing my first pic­ture. (The guard was not the least bit amused that I was hold­ing a freshly-developed Polaroid pic­ture.) Now, I’ve been bik­ing there on and off for months to prac­tice hill climb­ing, and this guy is hon­estly the first human I’ve encoun­tered. This, I reckon, does not bode well for the com­pany. But I’ll deal with them later.

The big­ger prob­lem I face—one that I had for­got­ten about completely—is the reci­procity law, which Polaroid Type 59 film flaunts so mer­ci­lessly. I’ve encoun­tered reci­procity fail­ure in black-and-white before, but Polaroid film is a strange beast: after just 1/125 of a sec­ond, it starts to inte­grate blue faster than green which is faster than red. Imag­ine tak­ing a pic­ture at sun­set and hav­ing it come out with a cyan cast. I guess I need a fil­ter holder and a set of gels now. Great.