OK, I just installed flash on my work machine. On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:39:25AM -0400, Doug Brewer wrote:
> The community leaders in my town, like too many others, will not rest > until it reaches the state of anonymity that visitors can't tell it from There's a town in Santa Cruz County called Scotts Valley. It was incorporated in the late 60's IIRC, pretty much so that the developers and land pimps, err, realtors, could get around Santa Cruz County building ordinances. Where there used to be a handy salvage yard for car parts, there are now condos, where there used to be an airport, there is now a K-mart. Though you can thank Woz, in large part, for the airport shutting down. For that story google: Wozniak, Scotts Valley, airplane, crash. Where it used to be a scenic little town with a few dinosaurs that you could see from the freeway, an airport and small amusement park, it is now basically suburbs, crawling up and over once lovely hills. Watch your speed driving through there though, there's a reason that it's been known as "Cops valley" for over 35 years. > any other place, so development of a new shopping mall "out by the > Interstate" is on-going, complete with generic restaurant chains and > national/regional department stores, now two steps removed from the old, > historic downtown area, which is in serious decline. It is the loss of downtown areas that I regret. I expect that documenting that would be a wealth of photographic opportunities. > > In between the two is the old mall, once thriving and full of local > shops to go along with the chains. It is now a ghost town, as most of > the big stores have abandoned it, taking their traffic with them and > killing the local businesses. > > It's been an interest to me for a while, wondering what will happen to > the space, so yesterday afternoon I drove over there, armed with my K-7 > and FA35/2, to see how it's doing. As part of a new project, called, > "What We Have Left," I want to document effects of this movement. > > Not a terribly original idea, I know, but it may be of local interest at > some point, and it's certainly in interesting photographic possibility. > > so, http://www.alphoto.com/images/whatwehaveleft/ The pictures are all nice. I like the composition of several of them. My first impression is that you're just at the mall when nobody else is, maybe later in the evening after most of the shops have closed. I'm afraid that I don't feel a lot of loss when one mall gets superceeded by another. Such malls tend to have very little of interest to me anyways. I wish I could find some clips, but KPIG http://kpig.com plays some great bogus commercials for "Gargantua Mall". What may be interesting would be some shots juxtaposing downtown, the old mall and the new. Perhaps the boarded up cobbler shop downtown, the shoe store at the old mall with no business and the one in the new mall. > > These are the first of what I hope to be many images on the subject. They are nice photos, but they remind me of when you get a neat shot by zooming in on a very small part of the subject. It's pretty, but it's only a very small part of the story. I look forward to seeing the rest of the story as you fill it out with more photos. -- The first step is learning to take great photos, the second step is learning to throw away ones that are merely good. Larry Colen [email protected] http://www.red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
