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