One Day One Roll | July 2020

In the town where I grew up, just one town over from where I live now, they put up a giant American flag every year. It’s enormous, it’s an ACRE in size. It hangs suspended between mountains in the mouth of a small canyon and flutters over hikers with loud earth-shattering flaps and folds in the wind. It’s hard to believe how big it is from the ground, so they hang a duplicate piece of one of the stars at the start of the hike, just so you can see how big it is. That piece is as tall as me. You can stand under the enormous shadow and watch the sun shine through the fabric.

I had an idea to bring my Polaroid and take a sort of mosaic that I could put together later like a panorama. I hiked the whole thing with my family, and then hiked back up a ways with my Polaroid afterward to get a view of the flag over the valley. But I made a mistake and thought I had 12 shots in one cartridge. I only had 8!! Between that and the fact that the full sun made it pretty hard to see, I shot them all too close together, which made for massive overlap when I had expected only a little that could allow me to lay them down and take shot of the compilation, which of course wasn’t going to work. The COOL thing is, that this made it so that most of the shots actually had the flag in them. When I overlapped them and made them varying degrees of transparency in Photoshop, it showed the flag fragmented, confused, flailing in all directions. It felt exactly how our country feels right now, and I inadvertently created something much more meaningful and truthful than originally intended. Isn’t that just the way it is sometimes?

So, for my One Day One Roll of July, I thought I’d share my Polaroids, and the compilation I made in Photoshop (above), and I might as well throw in some of my Color Plus faves from my hike with my Rebel 2000.

When you’re through, go check out the rest of my talented film friends by starting the loop at Peter Jeffrey’s post HERE.

Keep going! Loop to the next post HERE! I promise it will be amazing.