How to Change the Exposure on a SX-70 Polaroid Camera

First introduced in the 1970s, the Polaroid SX-70 camera remains a popular commodity with vintage camera collectors and Polaroid enthusiasts. The SX-70 system's easy-to-use photography system makes it a snap to change the exposure to adjust your pictures to turn out lighter (longer exposure) or darker (shorter exposure. Here's how to change exposure time.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Absorb how exposure works. In conventional photography, exposure time is measured by shutter speed. The amount of light you let into your camera, therefore, is a combination of the shutter speed and the size of the aperture (opening) in the camera lens that focuses the light coming into the camera onto the film.

2. Adjusting your shutter speed affects the size your aperture needs to be to create a proper exposure. Adjusting your camera to a faster shutter speed requires the aperture to open wider to admit the correct amount of light, and vice versa. The SX-70 was designed to be user-friendly and automatically compensates the aperture to reflect changes in the exposure time.

3. Locate the lighten-darken control on your Polaroid SX-70 camera. The "lighten" side is indicated in white, which blends through gray into a black on the "darken" side. The relative brightness of your current exposure setting is indicated by an arrow on the lighten-darken field.

4. Start by turning the lighten-darken knob to adjust the exposure time to be one setting brighter if you take a picture that's too dark. Move the knob one setting to the darker side if you snap a photograph that's overexposed (too light).

5. Take the picture again before you change the exposure more than one setting in either direction. Each setting on the lighten-darken field corresponds to about half a "stop" in exposure time. In photography, moving from one stop to the next represents a halving (or doubling, if you're moving downward) of the amount of light the aperture is allowing into the camera.

6. Continue to change the lighten-darken setting until you achieve the desired results from your photography.

Tips & Warnings

• The SX-70 takes focus distance into consideration when timing the exposure, and an incorrect focus calibration can cause your pictures to turn out lighter or darker than you wanted them.

Resources

• Get the SX-70 user guide from Polaroid.