“Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic” – Arthur C. Clarke

This past week marked the 41st anniversary of a camera deemed “The Greatest Gadget of All-Time” and one of “The Most Important Cameras Ever Made,” the SX-70 Land Camera from Polaroid. You might recall that last week I wrote about madly digesting “Instant: The Story of Polaroid.” This compelling book by Christopher Bonanos, details the life and times of Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, among many other inventions. Kurt Andersen, host of public radio’s Studio 360 and author of True Believers and Heyday recalls that the Polaroid camera was “by far the most uncanny, sexy, insanely great piece of technological magic in our household.” You do remember owning one don’t you? The gigantic, white plastic ones that were mass-produced in our childhood… Do you remember the intake of breath while you waited patiently for a photo to appear out the mouth of the camera? The blue-ish red tinge of the picture, and if you were lucky (my J.J. Abrams fan-girl is showing here) the tell-tale light flare from the sun, giving your snap that halcyon-ic, mystical quality of perpetual summertime mixed with bad 70’s hair and clothes?

Arthur C. Clarke was right. This piece of technology did seem like magic. For the first time we could take a picture and see it almost instantaneously. No more waiting for days, weeks, and in our household, even months for a roll of film to come back from processing, only to learn you cut off someone’s feet or head. The story of Edwin Land and the extraordinary steps he took to create an “instant camera” is compelling for any photography nut or technology enthusiast. Not unlike Steve Jobs, Land believed that anything could be invented that solved a problem, and that solution could and should fit in your hand or hands as you can see from the size of the SX-70 pictured above. The instant camera revolutionized photography, photo journalism and our every day lives, just as camera phones are revolutionizing our social interactions today. Each of us now has the ability to record history as it is happening and add to any photo journalism story in real-time. We see examples of this every day. This democratization of information is shifting the barriers between paid content and the ability to create and publish ourselves…but this is a story for my next post…please stay tuned next Sunday!

Today I wanted to celebrate the technological genius that is the SX-70. I took the snap above yesterday in Pikto Galleries in Toronto’s Distillery District. I’m sure Edwin Land would find it odd that his creation is now resting in a glass-inclosed box like a museum piece. I actually took this photo with a new photo app called Focus Twist, that nearly replicates the most recent next evolution of the camera, the Lytro. As David Pierce from The Verge reports:

“There are a few easy ways to make a digital camera better: make the sensor bigger, improve the quality of the lens, speed up the processor. But those are incremental improvements on a basic technology that hasn’t changed much in a long time. Lytro scrapped all that and built the self-titled Lytro camera, a digital camera that neither looks nor operates like any camera you’ve ever seen: it measures megarays instead of mega pixels, captures light fields instead of light, and lets you focus your pictures after you’ve taken them.”

The Lytro, in the market now for a year, comes in at a whopping $399 but imagine the ability to shift the focus of one of your snaps AFTER you have taken it? And then imagine that someone would come along, Arqball, and re-create this effect in an app that costs you a measly $1.99? You can learn more about the Lytro here, and Arqball’s app here. Magic indeed!

If you would like to learn more about what and who started it all, please pick up a copy of Christopher Bonanos’s book, Instant, and for those who would prefer a different medium, the CBC is airing a documentary tonight (Sunday April 28th) at 10 pm EST called Time Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid Film. Thanks goes to regular reader Claire Sharp for the head’s up on this documentary!

Have a great week everyone!