South Lake Union, Before Amazon

This is the shoreline before Amazon rebuilt it.

The frame is dated December 2010. Amazon had announced its move to South Lake Union three years earlier, in December 2007, and took occupancy of its first buildings here during 2010, with the rest of an eleven-building campus filling in through 2011. So this is the hinge, caught by accident. The towers that now read as this end of downtown are simply not in the picture, and the Spheres up in the Denny Triangle were still seven years from opening. What you are looking at is low sheds, boatyards, marinas and houseboats, on land that a decade later carried some of the most expensive office space in the country.

I did not know any of that mattered when I took it. I was standing at Gas Works Park because it is the only place you can see the whole south end of the lake at once, and because a still December night turns the water into a second copy of the skyline. The archival value arrived later and on its own, which is the usual way with these.

That is also why this post sits in South Lake Union rather than Wallingford. The camera was on the north shore, but the photograph is about the mile of waterfront on the other side, so I filed it where the subject is rather than where I was standing.

The technical footnote is the part I like most. This is roughly eleven frames stitched into one image about twelve thousand pixels wide, and it came off a Canon Rebel XS, the cheapest digital SLR Canon sold at the time. The most ambitious photograph on this site was taken with the least ambitious camera on it.