On my morning walk I began looking for things that would make good posters. I mean, I didn't expect to find anything, but you just never know. I tried to look at things in their parts, not just the superficial whole scene. I saw a lot of things in a new way, when I isolated the more basic parts of them. There were a few that might look okay, I just didn't know.

I did know that I didn't want to do the same old things. The things I had done over and over in photography. I wanted to do something different, if I even bothered to do anything at all. I was never very artistic, but I always had an eye for balance. It was what being a cop was about for me. At least a lot of the time it was about putting the world back in balance. When something illegal happened, the world was out of balance until it was made right. That is kind of what I did with images, I tried to make them balanced.

But I just didn't want to run out and shoot a picture with a digital camera, I wanted to make damn sure that the image was in perfect balance. That didn't happen when the shooter just went out to shoot every possible angle with a digital camera. Sure you found a good image mixed in, but there wasn't the perfect image. The one that comes from understanding the soul of the thing. I know that sounds like hokey crap and maybe it is. It didn't matter, I was still feeling my way along. I could afford a lot of false starts. I had already made one false start, which I managed to survive.

I kind of drifted for a few days. I guess I was more of a reactor than an instigator. Most of my life had been based on fixing things somebody else had screwed up. That being the case I guess it wasn't unusual for me to just drift, when not engaged in some project. It didn't hurt that I enjoyed drifting and collecting information.

For instance I began learning about old cameras because I had gone to a Civil War Reenactment. Then I began to learn how little people knew about old cameras. To the average public anything older than 35mm or a digital camera was an antique. There was probably some truth in that.

I stumbled onto a lot of information about the first Polaroid roll film cameras. The film for them hadn't been made in at least twenty-five years, so maybe they were antiques by that measure. I found that everyone who ever had one said they were tanks. Simple but strong as a bank safe. The lack of film problem was a real issue, but one not insurmountable. There were a couple of sets of conversion plans, but the didn't really appeal to me. I had a good 35mm camera, if I was going to an event just to shoot a hundred pictures.

However, if I wanted to make just one well thought out image, the Polaroid might be the cheapest alternative. It was on a very obscure blog that I found the answer. As usually happens, I found the answer almost by accident. As the blog's author said, the problem with the Polaroid was daylight loading. Carrying a small changing bag to unload it wasn't an issue. It was the loading of that second shot in the field on the hood of a car ect that became an issue.

What he had devised was a cardboard holder made from a cereal box. it was the size to fit the camera's opening. the holder was an envelope with one sheet of film. The film was nothing more than a sheet of 4x5 film trimmed and slipped inside the cardboard envelope,. The envelope had a square cut out to allow the light from the lens to strike the film. A long piece of black construction paper was slipped into the envelope to cover the opening, then the long excess was folded over.

Several of them could be carried to the field in an envelope. To load the camera the back was completely opened, then the film holder was placed across the camera's opening to the lens, the black paper tail was threaded around the roller and through the back as it was closed. Once the camera was ready to shoot the paper was pulled out, and the was ready to shoot. After the film was exposed the camera had to go into a changing bag to remove the exposed film, One could then slip the film into a small black envelope for storage outside the changing bag.

If a second shot was needed the whole thing could be done again. It was a long slow process which would definitely make one think before they pulled the trigger on the camera. Also to be considered was that the camera had a slow shutter. Plus it had only an average quality lens, so to get maximum sharpness, they designed the aperture to be very small. It went from and f8 to f36 so every exposure would be a long one I suspected. It would require a tripod and the subject to remain pretty darn still. It sounded like a pretty miserable way to capture an image, but it also sounded like a great story.

I put that idea on the back burner, but kept it in mind as a possibility. It would be a reasonably inexpensive hobby but one which would be time consuming. I knew that I would need things to occupy my time, so I kept the idea alive. I also knew that I did not have room for a full darkroom in my small living space. However, I had learned with the 35mm film that a scanner took up very little space. The bathroom or kitchen sink would work quite well to develop film. it was a doable project, so I began researching to the old Polaroids by model.