un-Earthing photographs
Shane Lavalette made a post earlier today about plotting photographs on Google Earth and encouraged other photographers to follow suit.
© Greg Wasserstrom
This was a pretty interesting exercise. I took this photograph almost two years ago on a day that was easily one of the best of that summer. Will and I borrowed a car (a 1980s Bronco bought at a police auction) and crossed the Potomac (visible in the lower right of the Google Earth image) into Virginia to make a trip to the Pentagon. I think maybe I wanted to take pictures or something, but the real goal was to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We had hardly pulled into the parking lot when we were told rather firmly by the police that we needed to leave.
Not wanting our outing to end on such an anticlimactic note, we went to check out this large abandoned building we found on a previous night about 100 yards from the Pentagon complex. This was not as easy as it would seem though. As we were pulling out of the parking lot at the Pentagon, there was this torrential downpour of rain and wind, hurricane like, eliminated visibility, flooded the roads, caused dozens of accidents and pulled trees out of the ground. It lasted about 25 minutes.
When it stopped we got out of the car and I took this photograph of Will. It’s still one of my favorites.