Sharp Top Mountain—Elevation 3875. We took a weekend trip down to Virginia recently to visit the legendary Jonny, and we had to take the opportunity to do some hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The hike to the top was less than two miles long, but there was a lot of elevation gain. We started at around 9 AM. It ended up being a really fun hike, and we had beautiful weather.

I’d bought some LomoChrome Purple in preparation for this trip. It’s a color-shifting film stock that supposedly shifts green to purple, blue to green, and leaves red/orange tones comparatively unaffected. I’d say it does a decent job, though it’s very contrasty, very grainy, and extremely unpredictable.

On top of that, something went mysteriously wrong with my camera when I went to unload this roll of film. The winding mechanism locked up, and I guess I pulled so hard on it that the film itself snapped into two pieces. I (stupidly) opened the camera to check what had happened, and exposed the first half of the roll to my ambient kitchen light for about 3 seconds. This particular frame was partially obscured, but as you can see, the left side and bottom edge were pretty heavily blasted by kitchen radiation. This is a great example of what I love about analog photography. Between the unreliability of 50+ year old cameras, variation between film stocks, and the process of developing film at home, there are tons of possibilities for “happy accidents”.