Tracks

I'd recently visited Kalamazoo and Olivet Colleges, so why not add another small school?

Somehow I'd never visited Alma before, so the trip offered an opportunity to make photographs in a city I'd not previously seen. I drove north, scouted around town and campus a bit, parked my car at the end of the business district, and walked into the school's grounds.

This track separates town from gown in Alma....

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While I didn't have any particular expectations about the Alma campus, it was still a bit of a surprise. Kalamazoo--a small college in a fairly substantial city--feels like a walled-off enclave. Olivet's open to its city, but since the campus is the reason the city exists it kinda feels like the city is an extension of the school. At least near the campus.

Alma College isn't like either of those. It's open to the city--indeed, it shares the city's main street (Superior) with the Central Business District--but the campus seems less geographically centered than the other colleges I'd photographed for the 366 Snaps project. My first impression was more like a small university than a liberal arts school.

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The 366 Snaps photo was of the Remick Heritage Center, where the college's performance arts departments are housed. I wouldn't have guessed it's twenty years old.

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A tablet's a preposterous camera. The camera's one strength is really obvious--it's got a great viewfinder, and it was bright enough for my purposes throughout last September.

The single strength is pretty well overwhelmed by the Galaxy Tab's shortcomings: The controls are really inconvenient, the 3 MP sensor's a sad joke, the lens isn't really capable of wide angles, the electronic zoom's unsatisfactory, and the tab's difficult to hold still. And it's such an obvious--and obviously unsatisfactory--image taking device that everyone notices that you're using it.

Actually that last thing--the obvious nature of the tablet-as-camera--can be a bit of a blessing. While everyone can see you're taking pix, the clumsy device convinces folks you're not a Serious Photographer. I imagine the folks who found me wandering their campuses taking photos with a tablet computer imagined I was a returning alumnus who didn't really understand photography.

Heck, they might even have been right about the photography thing. Who am I to say?

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Some comments on the software I used with the Tab.

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This photograph is an outtake from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps.

Number of project photos taken: 19 (yeah, I drove an hour and a half each way for 19 pix)
Title of "roll:" Never Visited Alma Before
Other photos taken on 9/13/2012: none.