In recent years, polaroid film cameras have seen a huge resurgence in popularity. Creatives, photography enthusiasts, and social media content creators alike are drawn to this vintage, organic look in their photos. With cameras like Fujifilm or Polaroid, creators can create faded photography that captures a distinct aesthetic. Unlike iPhones, with their over-sharpened processed look, film cameras have a texturized depth and distinct color blend.

But how? And why does this happen for Polaroid and not an iPhone? What are the mechanics behind taking a photo on these devices?

A camera is defined as, "a device for recording visual images in the form of photographs, film, or video signals." In a camera you will have a lens and a target. A target could be a photosensitive film or an electronic sensor. When you are ready to take a photo, you press the shutter button and it temporarily opens the shutter, so light can be projected onto a target.

The target permanently records an image by translating the light into the scene. Sounds easy right? Well, we will have to refresh your chemistry and physics knowledge to understand the mechanics of this process.

A camera records an image by capturing and recording light. White light is the combined wavelengths of the colored spectrum of visible light. White light can be broken down into three primary colors, red, green, and blue light. We can see objects and the world around us because the rays of light that are illuminating a subject, hit the object, and then its correlated color is reflected to our eyes. Colored light is either being absorbed by an object or reflected.

With the invention of film cameras, either black and white or colored, photographic film is the target. The film is light-sensitive because it is a silver halide emulsion film. Film has silver halide crystalline structures suspended in gelatin over the celluloid. When you see a film photo and notice its grainy look - it's because of that structure.

The way film works is that the shutter opens and light bouncing off colored objects (from the scene you are photographing) hits the film, the silver halide structures undergo a change. To understand these basic principles lets look at black and white film.

When we photograph a scene, the shutter opens and the photon (a particle of light) comes into contact with the silver halide crystal structure on the film, an electron is ejected from the valence band of the halide into the conducting band of the crystal.

This electron will then combine with a moving silver ion - forming atomic silver. The place where this occurs is the latent image center. This process of turning a silver ion into a silver atom needs to happen 3 or 4 more times, so the latent image center is stable. The latent image is invisible to the eye in the camera.

However, when you develop the film, these latent images will be amplified and stabilized to make a color negative. It is then no longer light sensitive and the atomic silver will become metallic silver creating visible dark areas due to its color.

The amount of silver atoms produced is proportional to the amount of exposed light. More light equals more dark parts on the film negative. When you are finished, you have a negative image of the original scene. It looks the complete opposite of what we see. Each color is represented by different densities of metallic silver. They are tonal representations rather than colored representations.

At this point you have the negative and you have to turn it into a positive, which is an actual depiction of the scene. You do this by inverting the image, by scanning your negatives yourself, taking them elsewhere for scanning and printing, or even making your own prints.

With Color Photography its even more complicated. Color film uses silver halide just like black and white photography, but the color film has three layers of emulsion. Each layer has a different light-sensitive dye mixed with silver halide that is sensitized so that each layer only captures either red, green, or blue light.

But, how do we permanently capture the color? We have to find a way to record light and then turn that representation into pigment - to do that we have to understand subtractive primaries.

First we need to know that additive is light like red, blue and green. They create secondary colors of cyan, magenta and yellow. That's where the subtractive colors come in, subtractive color is pigment. Remember with light, combine them all together you get white light, but with pigment, combine them all and you get black.

So lets circle back - we want all the colors of white light to be observed through the film and activate the crystals, right? Without any bouncing out. That means we have to have that specific color of light captured and absorbed. Think of film as an elevator, the light enters the top and travels down. We want each color of light to get off at their appropriate level.

Blue at the top, red at the middle and green at the bottom since they are all primary colors. Don't forget that colored light reflects off the same colored objects. That means you need a to find a color that absorbs your target color.

Remember in art class when your teacher explained the opposite color is always across on the color wheel? Well, then we found that the colors don't bounce, they absorb. So these pigments will catch our colored light. The silver halide crystals are coated in a color-light sensitive dye.

That way only that color will be get off on the appropriate level and the rest of the light is filtered through! The light reaction happens, and silver ions are changed to silver atoms! The colored film is developed, goes through multiple processes. Eventually only leaving the colored dye left, in the exact spot where the silver had been created!

So now, you have a negative color image of your scene. It looks crazy because the odd color pigment. But now all you have to do is inverse the image! You can for this by scanning your negatives yourself, taking them elsewhere for scanning and printing, or even make your own prints. Color correction can be done in several ways using either levels, curves or the color balance tool in either the scanning software or any kind of post-processing software. That's an amazing process! But so much work.

But then came the Polaroid. In a polaroid camera, the process happens within ten minutes.

Like before, you have light sensitive silver halide layer on the back. You take the picture and it develops the negative, which binds to dye. The remaining dye will naturally be the inverse of that, forming a positive image.

It then transfers this positive through the white layer, which also acts as the base white color of the image. This is why the film takes a bit to even start showing the image. The "development" of the positive is basically just bringing the unused dye to the front. At the same time, you can see a black layer on the back, which is applied immediately at ejection, since it's still light-sensitive for the next 10-20 seconds and if any light got to it, it would show up on the final result. In order for it to be fully developed it needs to stay in the dark.

Lets dive into how an iPhone camera captures a photo, which is a completely different process. When the light enters through the camera lens, the "target" in the iPhone camera is complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. A CMOS sensor is a silicone based sensor that receives light (photons) it will convert the photons into electrons, then to a voltage, and then into a digital value using an on-chip Analog to Digital Converter (ADC).

In the image sensor it is comprised of light sensitive pixels that detect light. In the iPhone 15 Pro, the sensor has a 48 megapixel camera, which translates to 48 Million pixels.

A microlens and Bayer Mosaic Filter is placed on top of the sensor. For the color sensor example shown below the color filter array employed is a Bayer filter pattern. This filters out only the colored light that is above the sensor. This filter pattern uses a 50% green, 25% red and 25% blue. In each pixel, there is a photodiode. A photodiode absorbs photons and converts that absorbed energy into electricity. The iPhone then reads the electrical current row by row one at a time.

The analog to digital converter interprets the buildup of electrons and converts it into a digital value. Once all 48 million values get stored, the overall image gets sent to the CPU for processing, it is then stored into solid state drive in the form of 0's and 1's.

What is really important about this process is how the iPhone interprets color. Semiconductor pixels don’t see color, they only capture the amount of light that hits them, so without a filter you will get a black and white photo. The Bayer filter makes sure that the light reaching each pixel is of one of the three primary colors.

Using Bayer Mosaic Filter there are twice as many green filters as red or blue ones, catering to the human eye's higher sensitivity to green light. Since each pixel of the sensor is behind a color filter, the output is an array of pixel values, each indicating a raw intensity of one of the three filter colors. Thus, an algorithm is needed to estimate for each pixel the color levels for all color components, rather than a single component. This process is called demosaicing, and the simplest demosaicing algorithms average the input of nearby pixels to obtain an idea of the full color.

So now that you know the difference between film and a CMOS sensor, lets see the physical differences of photographing the same scenes and printing them out.

The images below were captured with:

Polaroid Now + 2nd Gen, which allows you to use an app to manually just exposure and shutter speed on your polaroid.

iPhone 15 Pro Max which has a 48 MP camera.