Alley in Seattle. You have to wonder what happens to this city when an earthquake hits. Photoshopped. Click to embiggen.
Alley in Seattle. You have to wonder what happens to this city when an earthquake hits. Photoshopped. Click to embiggen.
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The interesting thing about the picture is the pseudo-cylindrical corner on the antique building. It may look cornball now but it was avant-garde for its time, with curved steel I-beams holding it up. The blue facade on it looks like cast iron. (They don’t build ‘em like that no mo’.)
The lens’s unfortunate pincushioning effect on tall vertical walls shot through an alley is irrelevant.
Same with yesterday’s San Francisco photo. The two cylindrical features & their copper cladding were intriguing.
Ol’ JCD probably knows more about your technical gripes than you do.
Old buildings held in relief to new architecture, churches and alleys (or hallways) are a reoccurring theme in this photographic artists catalog. Humans as subjects are in general absent or avoided. “”Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within”, wrote Claudia Johnson.
Many people resent being photographed especially by strangers.
whoa thats an awesome pic.
The only straight lines in a picture will run through the exact center of the photo. (If it hasn’t been cropped.) Fish-eye just becomes less noticeable it doesn’t go away. Things get more complicated when the “film” plane is not plumb.
A more pressing question is did the lady seated in the third floor window sign a release?
Instant Urban Renewal.
When and where I grew up it used to be done slowly with arson and then bulldozers.
But this way works too. If you get a 6.0 in Seattle it should be able to collapse 60% of the old city construction and damage most of the rest structurally beyond redemption.
Then the west of the country can look forward to living like they do in N’Orleenz, except for being wet all the time.
And before the mid-west gets all smug, there have been some truly impressive earth quakes out there, like in New Madrid in 1810.
#2: Improbus, since you live in the Midwest, there’s a fair chance that you *will* be affected by a tornado at some point. Pay attention to bad weather in that area.
When I was 9 years old, a small tornado jumped over our house with no damage except to a lamppost in front of our house. On the other hand, a garage under construction in a nearby housing development was turned into toothpicks by the same tornado. Luck of the draw…
One of my first jobs was to retrofit buildings in Seattle’s Pioneer Square for earthquakes. (where this photo was taken.)
The brick and mortar in some of those old building can literally be pushed over with your hands or a tap with a sledge hammer (I’ve done it myself.)
So, they use reinforced concrete, cables and plywood to add structure to the buildings.
I’m sure it helps but I still wouldn’t want to be in a one of those old buildings if The Big One hit.
>> Santa Maria said, on August 21st, 2010 at 12:32 pm
>> Seattle is not near or on any active faults… its not San Francisco.. why all the scare mongering?
There is a fault called the “Seattle Fault”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Fault
I don’t know how it compares to any in San Francisco but they got a pretty good hit in 1965.
As for the photoshop discussion — why don’t cameras digitally sign photos? Wouldn’t that be pretty easy to put in the tag? It sure would solve a lot of debates.
As a non city dweller I don’t get it. What’s the significance of the photo?
>> # 32 philgar said, on August 21st, 2010 at 7:50 pm
>> As a non city dweller I don’t get it. What’s the significance of the photo?
It’s the bend and tilt in the walls but people are disputing whether it’s the photo or the walls.
I have a different perspective since I’ve been in a number of those buildings — it’s the crappy brick and mortar that will come apart in an earthquake.
Seriously, some of those buildings are almost like a stack of bricks with loose sand holding them together.
@31, what’s the point of digitally signing a picture? If it’s digital, it can be counterfeited way too easily.
@32, alleys are an iconic element of city life. They are usually ugly and dirty, but somehow fascinating at the same time. Many bad, good and memorable things have happened in such almost secret places. There is a certain feeling of leeway/tolerance in the fact that such public places exist in huge cities, yet are out of sight of pretty much anyone. It’s like the omniscient metropolis is telling you “come on, you can have some privacy in here.” It’s like they are made for that, for the better or for the worse.
@33, aren’t most constructions pretty weak in the US? I see people punch holes through walls with bare hands in American movies all the time. That is utterly impossible in my country. I’ve never seen a wall that wasn’t made of very solid brick and mortar, including internal walls (good against noise). Except in shanty towns, of course. I’ve been told by people in the construction business that most houses and buildings in America are indeed remarkably weaker (and cheaper). If that’s true, it’s no wonder hurricanes can raze American cities so easily.
# 15 Santa Maria:
“Seattle is not near or on any active faults… its not San Francisco.. why all the scare mongering? …”
Sorry, incorrect — the entire northern west coast of the U.S. sits where the Pacific plate and Juan de Fuca plate subduct under the North American plate, leading to all the earthquakes and volcanoes there. Subduction zone earthquakes are the most energetic ones known (e.g., 2004 Indian Ocean quake). It was while my wife and I were living in Eugene, Oregon that they started discovering the approximately-every-400-years BIG 8.0 – 9.x earthquakes there, most recent one on January 26, 1700. They know the date because the tsunami it caused hit Japan. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake
#15 Santa Maria said, “Seattle is not near or on any active faults… its not San Francisco.. why all the scare mongering?
Sure there might be a 2.1M quake every 100 years.. but that ain’t gonna shake anything.”
Are you kidding? I was in DuPont, Washington which is about 30 miles south of Seattle on the Pacific coast. There was a 6.8 Earthquake less than 2 miles from where I was. Here are some pictures of the damage the earthquake caused in Seattle: http://olywa.net/radu/valerie/022801quake.html Seattle was 30 miles further away and it still got damaged.