instantfilm

Impossible Project founder Florian "Doc" Kaps is not happy with Fuji. After several letters and detailed proposals on how his company SUPERSENSE would keep peel-apart packfilm alive, Fuji has declined his proposals and refused to work with Kaps. Our final hope, it seems, may sit with the company CatLabs.

Fuji's Instax instant film was the bestselling item in Amazon's Camera category in the 2015 holiday season. It wasn't a fluke: the company's instant film business has been exploding in popularity in recent years.

Fuji announced last month that it's killing off the FP-100C, its last peel-apart instant film. Then last week we reported that Impossible Project founder Florian Kaps is now working to keep the film alive.

In the spring of 2014, I started a long-term photography project focused on Syrian refugee children. I traveled through Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon and photographed children who fled Syria since the war started.

Fujifilm's Instax brand of instant film has seen a boom in popularity in recent years -- it was the #1 selling product in Amazon's "Camera" category last Christmas season.

Sadly, the same can't be said about the FP-100C, Fuji's last line of peel-apart instant film. Today, the Japanese company announced that it will be discontinuing the FP-100C lineup, marking the end of Fuji's peel-apart-type film.

Film’s not dead, we know that. I love the nostalgia of instant film. The look of surprise when you can give a physical photo to your subject. The stories of photos the way they were when we were young. The way people over a certain age shake it while it develops.

I first got a Fuji Instax Neo Classic 90 camera. It’s mainly automatic and allows minor exposure adjustments. I longed for something a bit more manual. Then MiNT announced a new instant camera in March 2015 called the InstantFlex TL70. The camera is modern Twin Lens Reflex, with that retro look of older Rolleiflex.

Want an inside look at how The Impossible Project makes its instant film? The folks over at Highsnobiety recently paid a visit to the company's factory in Enschede, which it purchased from Polaroid and rebooted. The 3-minute video above shows various steps of the instant film creation process, from development, to assembly, to boxing it up for shipping.

In the digital age, there is a demand for instant gratification; however, is it possible that the perfect solution for the modern individual is an analog one? Instant film was a product introduced during the late 1940s and remains a popular option for instant physical prints to this day. Hold up your camera, press a button, and minutes later you have a fully processed physical image. And to think that it all started with a little girl’s simple question…

I recently took a Polaroid picture photo, but it turned out to be a dud... so I decided to dissect it for science!

Impossible launched its first lines of instant film in 2010 after acquiring Polaroid manufacturing machines and leasing an old Polaroid production plant. Although its efforts did bring "Polaroid pictures" back from the dead, its initial offerings suffered from poor image quality and slow development times.

There will soon be a great leap forward, though. Impossible is announcing today that it is launching Generation 2.0 film that promises to be better in speed, sharpness, and tonality.

The Impossible Project is continuing to branch out from the standard frame design for instant photos that made the original Polaroid pictures iconic. Last year the company launched a new line of film with colorful frames. This year it's the shape that's getting a makeover: the company has unveiled a new color instant film with round frames rather than square ones.

The Impossible Project CEO Creed O’Hanlon dropped quite the statement and statistic in an article on the resurgence of Polaroids by The Guardian.

"Teens," O'Hanlon said, "[are] turning their backs on digital for something more tangible." A fact he says is backed up by explosive growth in their sales to the 18-25 year old demographic.

Competition in the smartphone instant film printer industry is heating up. Companies like LifePrint and Fuji are tackling wireless mobile photo printers, and The Impossible Project has its analog Instant Lab.

Next month, a company called SnapJet is entering the ring. It's the "world's first slim, portable, open-source instant film printer" that helps you print your smartphone photos instantly on the go.

As of today, there's a new name in the world of instant photography; a name you'll definitely recognize; a name that you probably thought already made instant film cameras you just hadn't heard of; Lomography.

The Impossible Project, the ongoing effort to keep classic Polaroid cameras alive and well-fed, has added a splash of color to its catalog with three new special edition SX-70 that films sport gold, silver and colored borders instead of the usual white.

The Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 might just be that unusually sexy gem that will intrigue the masses and add a dash or two of fun into your photography. A camera that is going to have clients talking and friends gawking.

Fujifilm has confirmed that it will soon stop production of its FP-3000B film, which means that the only black-and-white instant film currently available in the 3x4 format will soon disappear forever.

Medium-format, questionable build and instant prints? Lomography has hit yet another trifecta with the new Diana F+ Instant Film, a low-fi shooter that adds instant printing capability to one of the company's most popular models.

A few months ago, I was in Los Angeles and grabbed coffee with my friend Eric Steelberg. Eric's a talented cinematographer and mentioned a piece of gear he wanted me to check out. Expecting the latest digital gadget to appear out of his bag, I was surprised to see him pull out a large brick of a camera that I'd never seen before. It was a Polaroid 180 Land Camera from the 1970s.

It seems the retro design movement has finally begun to infiltrate something other than the mirrorless market. In a move that makes its Instax line of instant cameras look a lot more like the X-Series line, Fujifilm has just announced the retro-styled Instax Mini 90 seen above.

When The Impossible Project announced its Impossible Instant Lab back in September 2012, it turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund the project. After the Internet got wind of the smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device, the fundraising campaign blew past its goal and ended up with a total of $559,232 from 2,509 supporters.

Today the company announced that the Impossible Instant Lab will be hitting store shelves on August 29th, 2013 for a retail price of $299.

After working with standard photography and digital cameras, Brooklyn-based artist Phillip Stearns decided to experiment with creating works of art using old photographic technologies. He ended up studying the effects of high voltages and household cleaning products on instant pull apart color film. The results are pretty wild.

Fine art and portrait photographer Edouard Janssens -- the man behind the 1 to 100 years project we featured some time ago -- recently decided that he wanted to begin using large-format instant film to shoot an art series of "eerie" portraits. In order to do this, he had to painstakingly acquired several pieces of expensive gear, and during this search he stumbled on one very special find: a box of 8x10 Polaroid instant film that had expired in October of 1978.

Here's an interesting fusion of analog camera technologies: Kevin over at the Hong Kong-based photo site FilMe figured out how to make his Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera shoot Fujifilm Instax instant photos.

Film emulation software company VSCO has added another offering to its lineup of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw plugins. VSCO Film offers the same high-end film emulation power as Film 01 and 02, except it's designed for mimicking the look of instant films rather than standard color and black-and-white film stocks.

Fujifilm is selling a cool Instax Mini instant camera kit over in Japan that makes it easy for new parents to do a 365-day photo project documenting the first year of their child's life. Called the Fujifilm Baby Box, the package includes an Instax Mini 25 camera (in either pink or blue), a photo album for holding the prints, a 5-pack of Instax film containing 50 shots, and a sheet containing 365 round stickers with hearts containing the numbers 1 through 365.

Over the course of a year (and a little over 6 additional packs of film), parents can snap daily pictures and label the instant prints with the day it was taken on by sticking a heart to it.

ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".

San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani, the guy who shot giant Polaroid photos of famous photographers holding their works, recently got his hands on Lot #1 of The Impossible Project's new 8x10 instant film. To test it out, Mantoani busted out his large format camera and 8x10 processor, and then visited a local surf shop to create a multi-shot panorama.