Polaroid 600

Polaroid introduced 600 film in 1981 for cameras with a flash built into the body. It is rated at ISO 640, about two stops faster than SX-70, and that speed turned the instant picture into an indoor and night object.

Everything in the look comes from the flash and the speed. The light leaves the camera, hits the nearest thing and stops. The subject is bright, the background is dark, and the contrast is higher than anything SX-70 produced.

Ask for the flash by name: hard direct on-camera flash, subject bright, background falling off to dark. That single clause carries most of the look.

Ask for the frame in the same words as SX-70, because the print is the same size. Square image, thin border on three sides, wide white tab at the foot.

Skin comes out flat and cool, with a hot spot on the forehead and the nose and a hard shadow edge on the wall behind. Sky rarely appears, and outdoors a bright sky clips to white while the flash still fires on the face. Shadow detail goes to near black within two metres of the subject, and that is the split from SX-70.

Use it for a party, a bar, a bedroom, a kitchen at night, or any picture that should read as a snapshot somebody took at the time.

Leave it alone for a calm daylight picture. With no flash and no falloff, a 600 prompt returns an SX-70 frame with the wrong name on it.

SX-70 is the same frame and the opposite exposure: slow, warm, soft and lit by daylight. Instax Mini shares the flash and the falloff but not the shape, because an Instax print is a small rectangle with a narrow border.

Cinema publishes Overexposed and Vignette at /techniques/cinema/. Overexposed lifts the whole frame toward white. Polaroid 600 does the opposite: it overexposes the subject and leaves the rest of the picture dark, so the two requests fight each other. Ask for the falloff, not for overexposure.

Polaroid sold 600 film from 1981, and the Sun 600 and later the OneStep 600 put a flash on every camera in the line. The result was the instant picture as a social object, taken at the party rather than of the view. Polaroid stopped integral film in 2008 and the Impossible Project restarted the Enschede plant in 2010. Polaroid sells 600 film today, and the cameras from the 1980s still take it.

The background comes back as bright as the subject, which kills the look. Say the flash falls off and the background goes dark, and give a distance in metres.

The second failure is warm soft colour, which is SX-70 leaking in. Say cool contrasty colour and hard direct flash in the same sentence as the film name.