PICTURES – The Polaroid Date (The Flash)

Words truly cannot do The Flash's Experiment - The Polaroid Date
 - justice :) So I will just let you enjoy ....
Thanks Flash - amazing contribution, and what a cool 
idea for a date!

Miss Twenty-Nine xxx

The words on the side of the pack of film instil a sense 
of unease in me: "the-impossible-project.com”.



I have been assured that the guy joining me for this 
challenge will be enthusiastic and not at all mindful of 
the absurdity of our task, but even still, I've never used a 
Polaroid before, we were forecast a day of drenching rain and
...really...we had to take pictures of 'Encounters', 
'Physicality' and 'Sex'?! 

What was I on when I thought this would make a good 
first date activity?!



I promised in my last post that this was going 
to be a good-looking occasion. Two good-looking cameras, 
a good-looking city and a good-looking date.

The prettiest camera disappointed. This one:



(Isn't it gorgeous?)

Worth about a pound, though, The Impossible Store told me. 
And no, nobody makes film for it anymore. So I walked out of 
that shop with a less-pretty but more-functioning camera, full 
of film (and a not-very-full purse –  instant film is expensive!).

On the day, the good-looking city bawled and threw a tantrum, 
like an angrychild, completely and entirely drenching me on my 
way home from a friend's house an hour before I was due to meet 
my date. 

(Angry child, it may be, but Manchester still makes a very 
beautiful angry child. At one point, we actually both stopped 
dead in our tracks, motionless for a good ten seconds as we 
saw the most beautiful orange glowing clouds sweeping across 
the city centre skyline.)

And how did my date live up?

Yeah, he did well! 

For the sake of the blog, let's call him The Video Man. 

(That's an unoriginal name for a guy who works as a 
wedding videographer.) 

I'd met The Video Man about three years ago at a friend's 
party. We had an interesting, if slightly bizarre conversation! 
Then we met again, accidentally, online, this last summer. 
I had finally given up my futile resistance to online dating 
(though I do maintain, it is mostly a horrible, artificial 
experience). We shared a couple of messages.

A couple of weeks ago when I was chatting about this project 
(with the samefriend who threw the party, let's call him 
The Cupid With A Bad Aim – he's recommended a few unsuitable 
guys to me in the past!), I question: 
“But where am I going to find a date?”. 

As a Christian whose faith is really important to me, 
my pool of eligible men seems pretty small. 

Cupid With A Bad Aim pauses to mentally check through his 
list of contacts – I can see him updating it since he last 
set me up – before taking aim and announcing that he knows 
just the person who would completely get on board with the 
visual aspects of this experiment and be great fun to do it 
with.

He made a quick phonecall and it was arranged … before I 
realised this was the same guy who simply hadn't replied 
after a couple of messages. 
Not awkward at all. Apparently, his subscription ended.

Yeah, well, whatever... he'd let himself be persuaded 
into a date, in any case!

We met in a coffee shop in Manchester's Northern Quarter. 
The rain had subsided a little since the morning, but the 
effects of it remained, making themselves manifest in my 
eclectic clothing choices: large avalanche-standard waterproof 
jacket and a large red polka-dot umbrella 
(which I like to think says 
'I'm-harder-than-you-Manchester-weather-bring-it-on') 
But it's ok. We're in the Northern Quarter and we have Polaroids. 

We fit in, regardless.

After figuring out how to load the second camera with film, 
(and not figuring out how to turn the flashes off), we started 
our experiment with Expertise. 

The baristas at North Tea Power had expertly crafted leaf patterns
on our coffee, as I'd hoped, so it gleefully became my first shot.



(Yes, I'm a professional photographer. However, I'd just like to say,
this is the first ever time I've ever used a Polaroid camera. 
Oh the irony of the title of that image.)

For all that I'm sounding negative, the project was actually 
really fun. 

We both got into the spirit of it, and really loved the novelty 
value of using Polaroids for the first time and the kiddish 
excitement at seeing them come out. If you've ever done darkroom 
photography... it's like that, but on a small (blue) scale. 
As they take 30-40 mins to develop, we left the coffee shop 
before learningfrom my technical focusing 'issues'.

It became a bit of a treasure hunt, with The Video Man ticking 
off the listas we went through it, wandering the streets and 
then taking shelter in thevisual treasure trove that is Afflecks 
Palace, where we were able to collect a lot of our bounty.

I got Money.



The Video Man got sex.



We flashed a LOT – never figured out how to turn those things off!



We spotted Disability but neither of us had the nerve to 
stalkerishly photograph the guy in a wheelchair, who was too 
far off to explain what we were doing but too close for us 
to snap unseen. Polaroids are really pretty conspicuous!

Along the way we chatted a lot about pictures and video – it was 
really interesting for me as a wedding photographer to hear about 
things from a video perspective.

The Video Man also showed me to an amazing painting I never knew 
existed on the ceiling in Afflecks Palace cafe. We thought we 
would use it for fame.

















(*Trust me, there's a Super Mario in there somewhere)


(*They're flags, ok?)




The date ended when we ran out of film. We retired to another cafe 
to watch the remaining pictures develop.



In all, a good date. :) 

As Miss29 has often commented during her own challenge, doing 
something a little bit out of the ordinary, is always preferable 
to a standard drink and this Experiment certainly provided an 
interesting mission to accomplish and along with it, an insight 
into how somebody else thinks and interprets things.

Creativity is something that's pretty important for me but is so 
much more than what someone does for a job. 

There are plenty of scientists, admin-types, office lads, maybe even
manager-types and people who don't believe they're creative, but who 
actually do think in quite creative ways. 

I imagine if you took some of them on a date like this, you'd start 
to see their true colours.

As you might have noticed, we only got 16 of the 30 topics, so I will 
just have to find another variation on this experiment to complete 
the task!

The Flash
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