The Underbelly Project

Project Statement

A small town’s personality is the sum of its population, commerce, and favorite hangouts. But once you strip away the daytime hustle and bustle, the town's backbone takes center stage. The after-hours store window displays, corner streetlights, and back-alley doors become the main attractions. This photo project highlights the underbelly, the seldom-seen, and the hidden places. All the images were taken in the early light on a Sunday morning.

NOTES:

This set of images has not yet been sorted or triaged to the final 5-7 for use in the project.
Final project images will be selected to match the project statement, not based on quality or visual appeal.
I deliberately edited the photos to make them dark and grainy to exaggerate the pre-dawn darkness of the town.
Blues, magentas, and browns are the predominant colors, intended to match early-morning shadowed light and bluish street lights.
Images were taken during several photo outings.
Captions have been included to help the viewer focus on the project objective, to show the Underbelly of the town.

Next Steps

Once images are selected, the next step is to objectively decide which images best match the project objective. You can start by eliminating those that obviously don’t, or the other way around.
It is important that you divorce yourself from the usual ‘best image by technical standards’ tendencies.
Following image selection, the next step is to sequence the images. There are many ways to decide on sequencing. For example, in this project, I may want to sequence them from dark to light, from blue-brown tones to lighter, orangish-red tones. My thought is to sequence them by the day's emerging light.
Finally, consider how the images will be displayed and whether the crop ratio affects how they look next to each other. If the images have a variety of aspect ratios, such as 3:2, 1:1, 16:9, or 5:4, this impacts visual flow.