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Almost a year ago the Film Photography Project gifted me a Polaroid Super Shooter. If you’ve never played with one before, this is probably the most basic version of the Polaroid Land Camera. It shoots Fujifilm FP-100C and FP-3000B. And I’m a black and white guy so I shoot FP-3000B.

I just don’t shoot nearly enough of it because I need to work out a strong process that defies the world of dust. And I need to set in place an archive system where these polaroid photographs aren’t destroyed by my office environment.

At the moment I tend to shoot the pack of film on location then throw the unpeeled polaroids into my coat pocket. I peel the film apart when I reach home and hopefully there’s a small breeze to help them all dry on a seat in the back yard.

The next step has been to scan each negative then bring the polaroid positives inside one at a time for scanning. That’s about it. They all get dumped onto my office bookshelf and I really have no archival process to talk about.

So over the next few months I need to focus in on the Super Shooter. I need to make a film holder box where I can safely place peel apart film until scanning to avoid dust and scratches. Although I’m not entirely sure how to handle the sticky negatives. And I need archival sleeves (guessing 4 inch by 5 inch could work). Anyway, this is kind of a work in progress.

I absolutely love that the Super Shooter is an uncommon plastic camera to shoot. People notice it in the hand. And this camera, for all the shortfalls, makes the odd angry damn fine photograph.

My only real issue is that I’m not retaining a dust free copy of film because my polaroid photography process isn’t robust.

An interesting ABC Science article by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki crossed my Twitter feed this week – Diet drinks get you drunk faster. He writes about the relationship between the alcohol ingested by a person and the alcohol absorption through the digestive system. In short, absorption is affected by what’s going on in the small intestine.

If two identical people drank the same alcoholic beverage but one had a sugar based mixer and the other an artificial based sweetener there would be a significant difference in the alcohol absorption. Not just the rate of absorption, but also the amount of the alcohol that is absorbed from the stomach through to the blood stream.

Your stomach will push out its contents into the next section of the gut, the small intestine, at what is pretty well a fixed rate. It’s about 8-12 kilojoules per minute. The food in the stomach just has to wait until the food before it has gone ahead. In other words, the presence of food in your stomach will delay or slow down how quickly your stomach empties. Alcohol with added sugar takes longer to move along than alcohol alone (that is, without any extra calories).Karl Kruszelnicki

And the extra time the alcohol spends in the stomach waiting to be processed means that some of that alcohol is destroyed by stomach acid.

So as a mazer I’m interested in that fact for two reasons:

1. A bottle of 12% ABV dry mead is therefore not equivalent to a bottle of 12% ABV sweet mead due to the sugars. All things being equal, the dry mead will absorb more alcohol into the bloodstream at a faster rate than the sweet mead.
2. The consumption of food before drinking alcohol doesn’t simply slow alcohol absorption. It means less of the alcohol will make it into the bloodstream at a slower rate. Some of that alcohol will be destroyed in the stomach environment.

This is also great information to have on hand when it comes to a choice of what to mix into cocktails (beyond mere taste) depending on the wide variance of mead – dry to sweet / short to sack.

This photograph is of my paternal grandfather William Lionel (Len) Clark at 22 years of age. He served 5 years as a reserve sailor aboard HMS Dart (1910-1915) and saw active service from 12 August 1914 to February 1915 in New Guinea. He then enlisted in the Australian Army at Leongatha in Victoria on 5 July 1915 – 24th Infantry Battalion (1-8 Reinforcement) – and left for war on the HMAT Afric A19. His service number was 3688. As far as I know, he never spoke of the War.

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