Trash to Vintage Polaroid

Recently I came in to the possession of about 4 boxes of old Polaroid film. Though Polaroid film can't boast great expose and fades over the years, I find the vintage look of the frame appealing, and so was anxious to use them. Unfortunately, they were well past their “use by” date, so all you got when you took a picture was a brown background.

Here I was with these good for nothing Polaroid pictures. I didn’t want to just throw away something that had so well represented the early stages of photography, and I really wanted to take advantage of that well known white frame. I got the idea that I could cut out the middle and utilize the white border, pasting it onto a cropped photo. I set out to do just that. I flipped the expired Polaroid film over and took my XACTO® knife to the seam.

To my surprise it cut quite easily, and I was left with an easy way to slide a cropped photo into the Polaroid "sleeve". With this new discovery I got to work measuring the opening in order to crop the photo. The end result must be 82mm X 82mm. I cut my photo accordingly, slipped the newly cropped photo into the Polaroid sleeve and taped the seam. 

So if you have any expired Polaroid film, or Polaroids that are so old you can't tell what the picture was, use this simple procedure to give your new photos that vintage look.