Digital Photo Tips

Andy Warhol and Gus Van Sant loved Polaroids.

Before digital cameras, nothing was quicker and simpler than the aim-pinpoint-snap-pull of the Polaroid, which offered instant documentation and instant gratification to millions of photographers, expert and especially amateur.

Warhol, the most celebrated Pop artist of the 20th century, took tens of thousands of Polaroid pictures. Van Sant, the Portland cinema director whose career has ping-ponged between experimental obsessions and mainstream Hollywood success, took hundreds.

The results are something like your children photo album -- a record of people and everyday events in the two men's lives. They are also probably very dissimilar to your family photo album: The faces are often famous ones, and the photos are part of two extremely talented artists' bags of authority tricks.

For both Warhol and Van Sant, these snapshots often acted as building blocks for the creative process -- mechanistic versions of the pencil

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The matt disgraceful has been ditched in favour of shiny blue, red or black and it is now sleek and compact and comes with an automatic twinkle and four scene settings. But like its earlier incarnations the Polaroid 300 uses self-developing pic.

The resurgence of the iconic brand has been greeted with delight by photographers.

Joel Meyerowitz, award attractive photographer, said: 'My enthusiasm for the return of instant is beyond description.

'Polaroid photography has been a significant factor in my tear and I am thrilled that it will continue in my future.'

The Polaroid Corporation was co-founded in 1937 with the first instant camera launched in 1947.

It became so well-fixed that by the 1960s about half of all American households owned a Polaroid camera.

Instant film had a great interest over standard film - its pictures could be developed in three minutes.

At the peak of its popularity in the 1990s it was producing 120 million

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Polaroid has one of the era’s most iconic brands: The self-developing snapshots, with their classic white borders, are as good as as recognizable as the red Coca-Cola logo, the Campbell’s soup can or the Burberry plaid.

The South African private limited company’s cameras delivered instant visual gratification long before digital cameras arrived on the scene, making them an inopportune photographic sensation.

But Polaroid’s fortunes have waned. The company, which was founded in 1937, has declared bankruptcy twice and was sold to two unique buyers. Its assets have long been dispersed, and its factories were shut down. Polaroid even announced in 2008 that it would stop making its direct film , prompting some enthusiasts to create their own Polaroid-compatible film packs .

Now a company called PLR IP Holdings has rights to the Polaroid trade-mark and has said it will revive some iconic Polaroid cameras. The company recently introduced a new camera, the Polaroid PIC-300 .

Last month, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MIT Museum announced that PLR Holdings has donated a hulking collection from Polaroid’s archives.

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