IDEA

So I started off this week with a little bit of research into Google maps. I wanted to spend some more time exploring the street view as well as finding how it is made. I found that they use a camera called the Dodeca 2360 that costs about $90,000 and is strapped on a tripod to the top of a VW Beetle. As soon as I found out the cost of the camera I immediately ruled out the possibility of being able to experiment with one, but that's ok.

I've found that the cameras in the US are much lower resolution than the ones that they use in Europe, and at first I found this upsetting, but the more I thought about it I realized that I could possibly use this to my advantage. I thought it would be interesting to contrast the high resolution of my camera to the significantly lower resolution of the street view screen grabs. I chose a few spots on street view that had people or other objects that would definitely change over timer and decided that I would go visit them in person and photograph them exactly like I framed them on the computer. When I arrived at the places I positioned my car to the approximate spot of the Google car and stood on my seats and shot standing through my sunroof. I brought my computer and used it as a guide to the street view shot and took multiple photos at different focal lengths.

Afterwords I came back home, uploaded the photos and began to superimpose the objects that had disappeared with time from the street view into the photo that I had taken. Not all of them came out like I wanted them too, but a few did, and there are more to come.





From a distance or at a smaller size you can almost not notice that anything is different about the photo, but if you zoom in, or if they are large prints and you move closer then you start to realize that something is not right. I have a vision of printing pictures like this very large to emphasize the relation between the high vs. low resolution within the photo. Also the larger I print them the more abstract the inserted figures become. This idea is very interesting to me and it is something that I have dealt with in past projects. While this may not be what my final project ends up like, I think it is a solid place to start and will be continuing to push, explore, and do research on similar grounds!