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Photographer Judy Lutz talks about her Polaroids. Watch »

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Maybe you still use it now and then. Or perhaps it’s gathering dust on some shelf in the garage or waiting in a box, ready for your next yard sale.

Your Polaroid.

Brownies and Instamatics were fine, but no other camera gave the shooter the immediacy, the intimacy and the elation of reproducing life in their hand. So, Polaroids likely surfaced at all the great and pedestrian moments of your life.

Graduations, vacations, breakfast. Most important, anyone could do it. You became an artist, a family historian, a memory maker in a click. Polaroid truly was the everyman camera.

In February, though, Polaroid announced that "marketplace conditions" had forced the company, which had seen sales plummet as digital cameras came into vogue, to make the "difficult decision." The company, which introduced the world to instant film technology in 1948, was discontinuing pretty much all of its instant film this year. The cameras had already been quietly phased out over the previous two years. The company was willing to license the technology. In lieu of that, by the end of 2008, Polaroid instant photography will be just a memory.

Judy Lutz was stunned.

"It’s something that I kind of forgot about," says Lutz, a photo editor at the Daily News. "I always thought it would be around. ‘I’ll get back to that in a little bit’ and a little bit turned out to be years and years.

"Some things you take for granted, and that art form I took for granted. I’ve got to do something now."

We called it the Polaroid Project. Both a eulogy and a celebration of this old friend, you’ll see the Polaroid images Lutz created in tribute to the unique qualities of the medium. Then, on Sunday, readers who submitted nearly 100 Polaroids from from the ’40s on, share their cherished images and the stories behind them.

IN MY HANDS

Written by Judy Lutz, Daily News photographer and editor

Flower headbands.

Bellbottoms.

Tie-dye T’s.

Drinking water from a garden hose.

They all evoke nostalgia. All have meaning to me.

I don’t want to let go.

I have a vintage vision, and Polaroid has helped me shape it.

Saying goodbye is not going to be easy and quite possibly impossible.

After reading about Polaroid’s impending demise, I hurried off to the nearest drugstore where I found only a few boxes of film left.

I knew that I was going to the Langerado Music Festival and I felt that it was the perfect place to start my homage to Polaroid.

Arriving at the festival I found earth darlings everywhere.

Flower headbands and homemade tie-dye shirts, bellbottoms and people drinking from hoses, golden opportunities that I felt only a Polaroid could truly capture.

From that event spawned a creative resurgence that took me to parades, Easter dinners, memorials and sporting events.

The challenges were many but the moments remain. Now if we could only convince Polaroid to do the same.