My wife has a lot of childhood pics on polaroid, they are all turning washed out green. Some are already too far gone to see what they were a pic of.
Is this just a thing polaroid film does? Much older photo lab printed photos are still fine and crisp as the day they were printed.
I’m not sure about color Polaroids, but the B&W ones included a squeegee of chemical that you were supposed to apply to them once they completey developed, or shortly after removing them from the camera. This chemical was the equivalent of “fixer” or hypochlorite bath for regular B&W emulsions. I did this to mine, and the few Polaroids I have are still good. Many people didn’t bother, given the sloppiness of the process, and I suspect the images faded as a result of this oversight. Color Polaroids may not have had very stable dyes, like the notorious Ektachrome slide films from The Great Yellow Father. Kodachrome, on the other hand, is/was as glorious as ever, since it had very stable dyes.
Are these peel apart or SX-70 type?
I just looked, I have a number of SX-70 pix from the 1970’s, they’ve been in albums most of the time. They seem fine as to colors.
As to mind the gap, I don’t recall the peel apart color ones ever having any applied stuff like the B&W ones (mostly the 3000 speed) did. I do recall that the development time was somewhat critical to proper color, if you took too long or too short a time, they looked pretty bad. The SX-70’s never had any applied anything. That was part of the appeal, you didn’t have to do anything, the camera just handed you the picture.
I’m not really sure or how to tell.
Doing a image search for polaroid green brings up this photo that resembles the damage exactly, not sure if this is real or a effect though.
Ok huh it says he takes polaroid negatives and washes them with water, I know the ones turning green have never been exposed to water above normal humidity.(be pretty hard to flood on the side of a mountain).
Would it be possible to scan them, thereby preserving them for the future? Otherwise, I don’t see any hope. Fact is, everything degrades - even obelisks and runestones. Time is, inevitably, on destruction’s side.
I have no idea what chemical cocktail is inside those polaroids, but as a general rule, light and heat tend to speed up chemical reactions (and air, especially oxygen, introduces a whole new set of reactions), so to preserve the original photos, my best guess would be to keep them air-tight, dark and cold. Maybe not too cold, though - something might crystallize which isn’t supposed to!
I guess the manufacturer of the film (or any polaroid film!) can give more specific advice.
Oh yea trust me that is the plan, scanning them I mean to at least have them viewable as is now.
I was just curious if all polaroid photos will degrade like this, since photo lab prints from the same time period have no degradation.
A non-SX-70 (AKA peel-apart) Polaroid print will have a white border of about 1/8" to 3/16" around all 4 sides. Just like a conventional non-Polaroid print of the era.
An SX-70 will have that same border on left, right, & top, but 1" to 1-1/8" border at the bottom. Like this: File:Polaroid 600 sunflower.jpg - Wikipedia
That bottom border was the reservoir which held the developing chemicals that got squooshed out across the pic as it was ejected from the camera.
How to tell:
SX-70 (or other integral developing) will have a inch or so tab where the developer pod was.
Type 108 or other peel apart color will have an even, small, all around border or none at all.
Aspect ratio is different, too. SX-70 is closer to square than the peel apart rectangles. Of course, the Square Shooter pics are square. Somewhere in my books, I have an old (79 maybe) Polaroid catalog. If I can pull it out, I’ll post actual film sizes. For that matter, it might be online in some wiki.
Shake it like a Polaroid picture!
Cool simulpost.
It may be how they’re stored that’s causing the degradation. Cheap photo album pages back in the day were quite an archival issue.
Definitely SX-70 type then!
Mo mom had some polaroids copied, not sure where or how but the copies seem to be fairing pretty well.
Polaroid had a mail in, or lab send in, copy service. Some of my dad’s Polaroids say “Copy by Polaroid” on the back. I have some slides of his, too, that say that on the mounts. The mounts fit 35mm trays but look odd because of the differences in aspect ratio of the image itself.
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I still have a few type 108 Polaroids from 1969. They look fine to me. I always used the little squeegee thing, which was a white plastic extrusion handle with a pink sponge trapped in it, all packaged in a nifty black plastic tube that was about like a 1.5 X scaled AA battery in size.
