Polaroid makes a comeback in age of digital photography

Sales growth

Weddings are a natural setting for instant film because the process makes photos more personal, says Nicole Kaney, a Florida-based wedding planner.

Photos snapped with instant cameras "tend to be a little more carefree and relaxed" than those taken with digital cameras, which are sometimes endlessly finessed for social media, she says.

The throwback trend has led to the creation of new instant cameras to meet demand.

Used classic cameras by Polaroid meanwhile sell for prime sums, sometimes hundreds of dollars, on eBay. Companies making new versions are seeing sales growth few would have predicted even a few years ago.

Fujifilm, which makes a new line of Instax instant cameras and film, says in a recent earnings report that sales remained strong in the United States and Europe, even as its sales of digital cameras decreased.

The Japanese company says it sold five million instant cameras worldwide in fiscal 2015 and expects to sell 6.5 million in fiscal 2016.

The Impossible Project, the company that bought Polaroid's last remaining instant film plant in the Netherlands - rescuing it from extinction - is also bullish about its own future.

The company founded by Florian Kaps, an Austrian biologist-turned-entrepreneur, now makes Polaroid-style instant film, an instant camera with a modern touch (it has Bluetooth and a mobile app), and an instant film printing device, which is what Follen uses in her studio, the Cleveland Print Room.