Broadway -- 12/06
Eric Richardson
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Last August Jim Winstead took photographs of every building on Broadway and posted them as a flickr set. I thought it was a great idea: taking a snapshot of the entire street at a single, defined point in time. I know I've used his shots many times to find an address or double-check the name on a building.
Here we are a year and a half later, though, and it was getting to be about time for the set to be updated. A week ago I did just that, taking 224 photos of Broadway from 1st to Olympic and posting them as the Broadway, 12/06 set.
In the new year I'll probably take a shot at a better way to present these shots. The optimal display is on a map, and they're all geotagged, so if you go to the set and click the Map link you'll get them in flickr's map interface. Unfortunately, you really need to go to the hybrid view and zoom all the way in for it to be useful, though, and flickr doesn't provide a way for you to link directly to those parameters.
The photo used above isn't actually in the set I linked. If you want to see it larger, you'll find it here.
jim on December 18, 2006, at 05:53PM – #1
cool! it was my intention to make this (and my similar sets for spring and main) an annual undertaking, but i ended up with other priorities this year. maybe i'll get back to it (particularly the other streets) next year.
what are you using to geotag your photos?
Eric Richardson (@blogdowntown) on December 18, 2006, at 06:26PM – #2
I'm just using flickr's built-in geotagging, so they're all manually placed. flickr (and by extension yahoo's) maps don't zoom in far enough to tag the correct building all the time, though. It has a tendency to snap to close points when you're trying to place a photo nearby. The flickr API itself supports plenty of precision, so a tweaked up GUI with a better zoom should work nicely.
Martin on December 19, 2006, at 12:15AM – #3
Eric, thank you for not talking about my Broadway page: you-are-here.com/broadway/
Eric Richardson (@blogdowntown) on December 19, 2006, at 08:11AM – #4
Martin: Your Broadway page (and site in general) is great, but it doesn't fit the "snapshot" idea that I find so interesting. Your Broadway shots are, I believe, from a variety of points in time.