Pictures Across America

Kodak is hosting a feature called On the Road: American Mile Markers. Matt Frondorf drove across the country from New York City to San Fransisco, taking a picture every mile out the passenger side window of his car. The camera was hooked to the odometer and fired every mile, but every 36 miles, he’d have to change the film he didn’t pull over or stop.

“I would count the miles,“ he says. “As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number on a log sheet, take the next one out of the cooler, and insert it. I got to where I could do all that in less than a minute, while steering with my kneecap.”

The whole trip took him 6 days in total. It wasn’t even his first one. In his bio, he mentions that he’d tried the trip before in a Porsche and taking interstates, but “[i]nterstates bypass small-town America, and when I-70 goes through the Rocky Mountains, you just get close-up rock faces. Besides, the car was so low-slung I got a lot of guardrails.”

If you have Flash installed, the viewer for the trip is one of the best uses of it I’ve seen yet. You can move in increments of 1, 25, or 100 miles at a time, see the route he took on a map and the 6 pictures framing the spot you’re looking at above. Oh, and all 3304 pictures are in there.