I’ve walked by Ground Zero for the past three years on my way to work and I still don’t have a mental picture of how much has changed. So I found my earliest photos of the site and tried recreating those photos this morning: after911.danwin.com
So far I have 2008 vs 2011, but I’ll look back at my other photos of the location and see what’s changed.
In search results, the title tag for the mobile site, as read by the Google spiderbot, is apparently shortened. Though at the rate of gentrification, someday there will probably be a story titled, "In Bedford-Stuyvant, a Black"
Just got back from an Alaskan cruise through the Inside Passage; the weather was beautiful, there were glaciers, etc, but one of the highlights was the tourist trap of Skagway, a town of about 800 that had enough shops to host three cruise ships (about 2,500 people each) while we were there.
Hidden away from the main street was the week’s most interesting kitschy shop of all: The Sarah Palin Store. Though the former governor is primarily associated with Wasilla, Skagway was apparently her childhood Alaskan home.
And, Skagway is home – as the woman who works there put it – the world’s only Sarah Palin store:
It’s part of a shopping plaza on Broadway, between 5th and 6th avenues:
The amount of merchandise was astounding. Off of the top of my head, the Palin-branded merchandise included: t-shirts, tote-bags, Christmas ornaments, bumper stickers, books, paper dolls, commemorative coins, koozies, chocolate bars, mints, “Tea Party” tea, ulus, lipstick, calendars, and hockey trophies:
The woman working the counter said the store has been only open for two years, isn’t at all affiliated with Palin (though the owner knows her parents or something like that) and that Palin hasn’t yet visited. What a shame, I thought New York was a little awesome for having a Big Lebowski store, but this must be the only store based solely on a vice-presidential candidate.
More (non-Palin) photos of my Alaska cruise can be seen on my Flickr account.
I didn’t feel like grilling on the 4th since I leave on a long vacation the next morning, so I thought I’d stop by the Rockefeller Center to see if it was at all crowded for fireworks (I paid for a $75 membership so stopping by is free for me. Also, I have no friends with prime west side viewing decks). I got there ridiculously early, about 5pm, but it was so beautiful that I just sat on a bench and read, and even did a little laptop work (there’s now free wifi there).
It was surprisingly empty but at around 630ish, people with serious camera gear were staking their claim. So I went to the top deck and picked a spot to lay my camera on and listened to a few episodes of “This American Life” (waiting a few hours for ANYTHING is nothing compared to waiting 6 hours in the cold during my once-and-never-again New Years Eve in Times Square experience).
As the pics and video below should show, the sunset was far more beautiful than the fireworks, which were diminished by the Hudson River’s distance from the Rock, vertically and westwardly. You couldn’t hear any of the music. But one cool benefit to being above the city is that you get to see what seem to be the dozens of fireworks shows across New Jersey and Brooklyn, puny as they are in comparison.
My sloppy video:
I wouldn’t go again, the fireworks just seem too distant and beneath you, literally, to be as enjoyable at ground level. Still, I didn’t regret finally getting to see a sunset over New York from a skyscraper.
Walked by the midtown Apple Store last night (July 1, 2011) and it was undergoing renovations. Even the stores get the white box treatment, apparently.
After trying too hard to rewrite my really old Flash gallery as a jQuery plugin, I thought “to hell with it” and decided to join the one-pager trend: http://photos.danwin.com. I have to say, this was one of the more pleasant site-designing jobs I’ve done in awhile. I’m going to try to limit my sites to one-page or fewer from here on out.
photos.danwin.com
I started with a HTML5 template from initializr.com and then tacked on the 1140 CSS grid sheet, a fluid framework.
As far as Javascript goes, besides jQuery, I’m using Ben Alman’s throttle-debounce plugin, Leandro Vieira’s lightbox plugin, and Ariel Flesler’s scrollTo plugin for the simple interaction bits.
It’s pretty rudimentary in terms of code sophistication…I haven’t yet decided how to lazy-load the images while still providing a full page for non-JS users. I think I’ll end up tacking on backbone.js and figuring out a JSON structure to load in the “galleries”. So, for now, deal with loading some 100+ images all at once from S3…
To me, it’s an improvement over the typical slideshow galleries in which only one image at a time is shown. Maybe it’s because I don’t have enough Big Picture show-stoppers to justify displaying every photo as full-screen. But I think there’s some artistic room in manually arranging the images as a collage and purposefully deciding the size of each image in relation to the others.
The best part is that with the 1140 grid system, not only was designing for variable-width desktop browsers (and placing the images) a breeze…the site works very well on the iPad and passably well on the iPhone…and I barely even left Google Chrome on my Mac during the whole development process.
Now I just have to get some better photos. And maybe think the typography a little more…Meanwhile, check it out:
An incredible photo essay by photographer Donald Weber, who worked for five years to let Ukrainian authorities let him photograph inside an interrogation room. His photographs attempt to capture the moment that a suspect breaks:
Once inside, he looked not to the men who did whatever it took to extract an admission of guilt, but on the suspects before them. The photos here attempt to capture the moment when the accused come to realize the enormity of the state power their interrogators embody—and accept that they will have to submit.
This photo, according to the slideshow, is of a delinquency and shoplifting suspect:
Ukrainian interrogation / Donald Weber (VII/Newsweek)
In this story about a Chicago gang-related shooting at the funeral for a previous victim, the anonymous users predictably take the lead on vile.
Yeah I know this is a cliche shot, but hey, someone else has got to do it (again).
I took this from the Top of the Rock by holding the camera between the gaps in the glass barrier and counting about two minutes after each lightning strike before squeezing the shutter for a few shots at a time (the Canon 5D MkII shoots at 3.9 fps). Nothing too complicated, just having to put up with drizzle.
