There Is No Cat - Failing to reproduce Polaroid Chocolate film

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Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Failing to reproduce Polaroid Chocolate film

If you know the details of how Polaroid's long lost Chocolate peel apart film worked, you know that it was a combination of a color negative with black and white chemistry. My understanding is that the original use of the process was by people using 8x10 peel apart film manually combining the required pieces. I shoot 8x10 Polaroid, but the process now is derivative of the integral process, like the iconic SX-70 pictures. I figured I should see if I could recreate that film with the integral process instead of peel apart.

I failed.

For my first attempt, I should have read up on things, because I misremembered and tried using a black and white negative with color chemistry. That didn't work at all. I got a blank white frame (mostly; some of the chemistry didn't spread, so there's a brown blob in the upper right corner). Oops.

But that left me with the required materials to do the experiment correctly, with a color negative and black and white chemistry.

This also failed.

I got a picture, kind of, and as the print has aged over the past several hours, the colors that were present have migrated to a more brown look, but most of the photograph didn't develop at all. If you look closely you can kind of almost imagine what's there, but no, it's not a success.

So, for science, and to save anyone else from the trouble and expense, the new integral-based 8x10 Polaroid does not have the ability to create the classic look of Chocolate film.

It only cost me two sheets of 8x10 to find out.

Posted at 6:41 PM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio