Here’s another cool site featured recently by Neatorama that I can’t get enough of… Scouting New York.
I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention.
What a great job, and what a great idea to go along with that great job… Grab photos of some of the unique but easily missed features of the places you see. And New York City has plenty of character hiding everywhere, but hiding in plain sight. It just takes someone like Scout to see that character and point it out to those who are too busy to notice the beauty that’s around them.
I usually think that I’m pretty good at that — among my family and friends it’s usually me that notices the oddball little out-of-the-way places and the weird little details that others will miss — but I don’t always take the time to sit down and write about them. Around Sioux Falls, there are lots of historic sites that are marked by Historical Society plaques; I started a while back taking photographs of those markers and sites, and writing a little about them on a Blogspot site — Sioux Falls Historic Sites (yeah, original name, I know…) — but my updates have been sporadic and I’m somewhat ashamed to see now that it’s been over two years since I last added a post. I’ve still got photos of a couple dozen more markers sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to get around to writing about them, but still, there they sit.
But beyond even the historic sites, there are plenty of details in the old buildings around town that could be “scouted” & written about… Of course, Sioux Falls doesn’t have the wealth of old interesting things that New York has… But still, it’s a great idea that I might have to pick up. Maybe just add to my SF Historic Sites project? Yup, in my spare time.
