Your not-quite-standard city street

Donncha asked yesterday how I had gotten the Harbor Island shots without stomping around private property. This is a perpetual concern, of course, when something interesting catches your eye but the best vantage point isn't on a public street or right-of-way.

Part of what made the Harbor Island outing so interesting was that all the urban-wasteland scenes we wound up photographing were shot from what were technically just city streets, although these aren't the sorts of streets I usually spend my time on. As you can see in this shot, they're the sorts of streets where people park their trucks! Out-of-frame to the left are the loading docks, and yesterday's container. So, these are just "regular" Seattle streets that happen to have lots of industry and rail tracks running through them! My friend actually remarked on this while we were walking around; he found it strange that people drove to this area every day to go to work, since it seemed so alien to us.

I took this shot with a Zenitar fisheye that I rarely use. The image data shown on the full-size-image page doesn't show the aperture or focal length, since the lens doesn't communicate with the camera body at all, and has to be stopped down by hand (which makes the viewfinder very dark unless you focus with the lens opened up and then stop it down right before shooting). On the crop-factor 20D, it can sometimes look like a regular rectilinear wide-angle lens, like here, where the fisheye distortion isn't too apparent. I'll post another shot tomorrow where the distortion is much more obvious.