Doing Some Excavating

Although nice to look at, I didn't want to only share a picture of me today.  This is a photograph I took of an excavator that was sitting at the side of a big hole in the ground across the street from my apartment.  Someone has been working on a seemingly small scale construction project in the public parking lot across the street for, what I would consider, an disproportionate amount of time.

It all started a few months ago when I came home and noticed a small portion of the parking lot partitioned with orange plastic construction fencing.  About a year ago some developer had a sign up saying the parking lot was the future home of some new condos (terrible idea), so I wondered if they were finally breaking ground on these.  I slowly began to wonder if they were breaking ground on anything, as the site sat idle for the next couple of months.  Strangely, although the site was cordoned off by the plastic fence, there was still a place for cars to enter, so it was just an annoying mild inconvenience to anyone who wanted to park in that lot.  During this time we had a pretty strong storm with strong winds which came along and blew almost all of the fence down.  Until some guy came back by and put it back up a few days later, the inconvenience was even smaller, as people could now park directly on the fallen fence.

Finally a few weeks ago I woke up to see some construction equipment being moved in, and within a few days part of the parking lot was gone.  These guys actually worked pretty quickly for the first two days of this phase, but left and didn't come back for another week or so.  They finally came back and dug a bit deeper and cleaned up the hole, and left it in the state I found it in for this photograph.  They've done some work since, but the scale of this project doesn't lead me to believe these are the stupid condos that were planned.

Technically, this photograph is a combination of nine photographs I took in succession to get this point of view.  I then combined them using some panorama software, and did some post-processing in Photoshop.  I like this picture because of the point of view and the subsequent distortion in the image.  It makes me think of a super wide fisheye lens, but not quite as extreme.

Regardless of what these bozos are building, the best part was every morning when the driver would start the day out right with a quick 360.