These photos will make you wonder why we ever invented digital cameras.

Welcome to Mamamia’s art endeavour, the Voulez-Vous Project. Every week we celebrate emerging artists, designers, illustrators, creators and women who knit using their vaginas. (Kidding. Maybe.)

The aim: to make the internet a slightly more beautiful, captivating, or thought-provoking place. To find out more about the Voulez-Vous project, click here.

This week’s featured artist on the Voulez-Vous project is Rachael Baez: a photographer with a specific film of choice – Polaroid.

“There is a certain charm and dreamlike quality with Polaroid images that I’m attracted to,” she says. “I enjoy experimenting with Polaroid’s expired films because you can achieve some unusual and unpredictable results. My favourite camera is the Polaroid 180 model which was made in the mid 1960’s and is fully manual which provides lots of challenges and also makes me slow down and compose my photos more thoughtfully.”

While Rachael says that she doesn’t consciously try and create a particular atmosphere in her photos, she feels that they are a reaction to modern modern society.

“More and more the world is becoming obsessed with reality TV, up-to-the-minute news feeds, etc.,” she says. “My photographs are a way of retreating from that onslaught and perhaps taking time to enjoy nature and view the world from another perspective.”

The effects you see in her photos certainly aren’t created by photoshop, and Rachael tries to do her creative effects manually.

“There are so many interesting ways to work with this medium of photography, which is what makes it so exciting,” she explains. “Some of my effects are achieved by attaching a plastic lens filter to the camera itself (motion blur, duplications) or image cropping. I enjoy the challenge of doing things manually – which is why analogue appeals to me.

“I do transparency peels which consists of cutting the border off the photo, heating the top layer and then peeling the photo apart, leaving you with a transparent image. This gives you the flexibility of layering other images, patterns or objects underneath. The film itself can also be unpredictable and I’ve also had some happy accidents with that.”

If you would like to see more of Rachael Baez’s work, you can see her website, Flickr, and work on the 12:12 project here.

Do you know an artist (or are YOU an artist) who creates beautiful or thought-provoking work and whom you think should be featured on Mamamia’s Voulez-Vous Project? Send an email to info@mamamia.com.au.