Aaron Muderick has written a solid primer on Polaroid photography:
Every film photographer will tell you about the shots they lost because the lens cap was on, the film was bad, the camera setting was incorrect, or their own technique was mistaken. In the film era, one only found out about these critical mistakes days or weeks later when the film was developed and processed. By this time, the shot was lost forever. Digital changed all of this with the tiny video screen on the back of each camera.
However, the inventors of the digital camera were not the first to solve this problem of image turnaround. In 1947, a Harvard dropout was driven to invent by the impatience of his three year old daughter: “Daddy, why can’t I see my pictures NOW!”. His name was Edwin Land and his company was Polaroid.
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