Waiting for the Colors to Come In

Being a media designer who can’t properly use Photoshop is a specific kind of embarrassment, so I’ve developed genuine affection for software that just does the thing automatically. Poladroid—free beta, Mac and PC—is the best recent example. Drag a photo onto it and it produces a Polaroid: the click of the shutter, then the slow chemical bloom of colors developing, and the wait. That specific wait where you watch the image materialize and resist the urge to shake it, even though you know shaking never helped, even back when there was actual film involved.

The nostalgia in it is almost mean. Polaroids were always about the gap between taking the shot and having the image—that lag where the thing you’d just seen existed somewhere between the world and the photograph. Poladroid recreates that gap for files that have been sitting on your hard drive for years. The image already exists; it still makes you wait. I find that funny. And a little affecting, which I didn’t expect.