This camera was produced from 1971 to 1973 and became quite famous as
the artist Andy Warhol made abundant use of it. It was very cheap,
under $ 20. It's for portraits and only works with Magicubes (not
Flashcubes!).
Its features are:
Lens: 220mm, f/29 meniscus single-element plastic, fixed-focus Shutter: single-speed mechanical Flash: Built-in socket for Magicubes Designed for flash photography only, daylight exposure not sufficient. Intended for use with 75/80 ASA color films only
Fixed-focus rangefinder for determining the correct (fixed) distance
from subject. Finder has projected framelines. Built-in mechanical development timer.
The following text is mainly taken from the Land List website.
The
camera is designed for portraits only. Anyone using this camera
will quickly find that it requires the photographer to make quick
back-and-forth walking movements and head motions to find the correct
fixed distance from the subject. The strange 'dance' resulting from
these movements has sometimes been referred to as the "Big Shot
Shuffle".
This camera has a small flexible rubber T-handle
mounted to its back, instead of the big plastic "flop-around" T-handle
found on most of the other rigid plastic pack cameras. Evidently, age
has not been kind to the Big Shot's rubber handle, as nowadays the vast
majority of Big Shots are found with cracked or missing
T-handles. Your camera will still function just fine with a broken
T-handle.
Image quality is somewhat better than you might expect
from a simple single-element plastic lens. Not only is this due to the
small aperture used in this camera, but also because the long focal
length and fixed close-focus means that only a small portion of the
lens's image circle actually gets used to expose the film (simple
lenses tend to be far sharper at the center of their image circle).
This
camera was a particular favorite of artist Andy Warhol, and he
apparently painted many of his portraits based on pictures he took of
the subjects with a Big Shot camera. According to at least one report,
Warhol liked this camera so much that he bought out Polaroid's
remaining stock of Big Shot cameras when he learned that Polaroid was
discontinuing it. I have no idea if this story is correct or not (my
guess is that it's an exaggeration of a partial truth), but it's kind
of amusing anyway. :-) [Perhaps he felt the Big Shot's 15
minutes weren't up yet..?]
COLLECTOR'S NOTE: Unusual limited-use
design, but was still quite popular. These used to be surprisingly
common, but now they seem to have developed a bit more demand from
people wanting them for portrait work. They're still not uncommon,
though.
As the
camera only works with Magicubes which are hard to find these days, I
have tested several replacement solutions. They are here and here.
Some photos:
The Polaroid Big Shot, box, istructions and a box og Magicubes.
