Polaroid Series: Instax Mini 10

I have always been interested in Polaroid Cameras, I remember asking for my first camera for my 11th birthday, back then the film was much easier to get a hold of and I went around snapping friends and family.  

Fast forward 15 years and my collection has grown dramatically, I have a large variety of shapes and sizes, with beautifully preserved vintages cameras, to the modern makes and I just love them!

I feel Polaroid photographs are something really special, something you can hold, watch develop and own forever unlike the thousands of pictures you can take on your phone that later get deleted when you eventually run out of storage. For me, Polaroids are capturing a moment in time and to me, even the ones the go 'wrong' can still be beautiful.

I thought I'd put together a little mini Polaroid Series here on my blog to talk about all the different shapes and sizes, prices, techniques, advice on cameras and film and hope to get some more people interested in such a cool hobby. 

I wanted to start first with my Fujiflm Instax Mini 10. I've had this for around 10 years now I think (and could probably do with an upgrade) and I bought this one specially to take photos for my wallet, as this takes little wallet sized photographs. I purchases this from eBay many moons ago now and was probably much cheaper than they sell for today!

Firstly, this is probably the smallest Polaroid camera I own, it's still a little bulky but is certainly easy to carry around in your bag to whip out and snap away when needed!

Secondly, this is probably the cheapest to fund in terms of batteries and film. This particular camera takes 2 x CR -123A battery (can be found in Wilkos) and I bought some when I first bought the camera and haven't needed to replace them at all! Longest battery life ever!

In terms of film, you can find plenty of bargains on eBay for this, I think typically you can get about 20 shots for £20, which may sound expensive but when you realise it usually costs around £20 for 8, yes 8 shots, on a larger Polaroid, it soon makes it more appealing! What I love about the film for this camera is the variety, from things like Miffy, coloured frames, to Marvel theme or Disney, there are loads of different film you can get to experiment with. 

House party during my third year of uni, I'm the one on the far left! P.s Miffy is so cute!

The camera itself doesn't hold much in the way of professionalism, mine is particularly simple but I'm not sure if there has been any updates to the Instax 8. You have 2 distance settings which you can switch between on the top, one being a close up 0.8m- 3m and one for anything further than that, so 3m - infinity. It uses flash on all of the photos taken, whether during the day or at night, as this is just how this model works. Then you have a power button to turn on and off, however this does turn itself off if inactive for a set amount of time to save battery power. 

So you pick your distance depending on the subject, look through the view finder to line it up and click the shoot button on the front. This model has the film come out of the top, thankfully for this model the film is good enough to leave unshielded (more on this when we get to larger models) so you can take it out, hold it and watch it develop in front of your eyes!

Another great thing about this size of film is that there are plenty of photo albums around for you to store your film in, which is something that really hinders the larger film sizes. I bought these little albums a couple of years ago from eBay and it holds loads of them and I'm sure there are much more varieties up since I last looked. 

The only downside to this camera is probably the lack of settings, you can't really take any photos of things at distance and the images can come out blurry, but as a fun little point and shoot camera, I really recommend this, especially if you like taking snaps of your friends! This is a great little camera to get you interested in Polaroid cameras.

Please note that the Instax Mini 10 and the Instax mini 8 are basically the same camera, the 8 just has more aesthetically pleasing properties, such as different colours but they take exactly the same film and work in exactly the same way.

If anyone has any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me!

I hope you like this new series and I'll be back with instalment 2 soon!

Tarnya 

xx