My senior project was to take digital pictures of small towns of the tri-state area. I would drive to a random town (often picking the town by driving around randomly for a while) and drive through the town to get a feel for the good places to take pictures. I would then park the car and walk through the town and take pictures of anything that looked interesting.

Equipment that I used

I used an Apple QuickTake 150 digital camera to take the pictures, as well as occasionally using an old manual Pentax camera. I really liked using the manual Pentax, but am still learning alot about it and the pictures didn't always turn out. The digital QuickTake camera also make it a snap to upload the pictures to the Internet. The only disappointing things about the QuickTake are the lack of focus, F-stop, and aperature settings. The pictures turned out very nice, although many were a little too dark (this is a problem with this series of camera). I would then download the pictures to my ApplePowerBook 180c. I would then use Graphic Converter software to convert all the pictures from PICT format (typical mac format) to JPEG format (used for the Internet) in one easy swoop. Then, over my internal ethernet network, I would upload the pictures to my Big Computer which is on the Internet. Following that, I would write the HTML code (code for webpages) that would display the pictures with a small caption. This was done on the UNIX workstation, using vi.

Techniques I used for photography

One of my favorite things to do with photography is to get out of the boring eye-level range. I quite often find myself laying down on the ground or kneeling to get a more interesting angle. I also like having a "useless" object in the foreground (like a car or mailbox) and the object everyone thinks they should be looking at, the building, in the background (slightly out of focus, if possible). The other thing I do often is take many pictures of the exact same thing from a very slightly different angle so I can later find which one I like best. In this project, I actually included every picture I took with the digital camera so you could compare them ourself.

What determined what I took pictures of

I was really learning as I went along with this. I knew I wanted to take pictures of small towns and their main streets / commercial areas. I wanted to find towns that were very small and had buildings that looked very old or ornate. Modern buildings were out. I would walk down what I determined to be the main street of the town, or the street with the "cutest" buildings and take pictures of various buildings (banks, restaurants, little stores, postoffices, garages, libraries, etc.). I also tried to take pictures of the people walking around (when they actually were there) and a picture or so looking down the sidewalk, vertically. By the time I finished taking pictures of each town (usually 16 pictures or 32 pictures, because that is what the camera will hold), I felt that I had well documented the nicer part of the town, building by building, as well as shown just a little bit about what the residents of the town do for recreation (i.e. movie theaters, restaurants, etc.), and maybe where they worked (i.e. Batesville's industrial district).

Addresses for the Project

You can find my entire senior project, including every single picture with captions at any of the following Internet addresses...