Street view in DK (updated again)

DK got google streetview now. I've never tried it before, but Copenhagen Eye roused my curiosity by mentioning this scene on Vestergade 12, Copenhagen. (I tried to link directly, but for some reason it seems you can't.)


It amazes me how nostalgic, or something, it makes me to browse pictures of Copenhagen. I've only been there pretty rarely in the past decade, but I know it so intimately, so it's at once some strange and wonderful place, and like home. I keep wanting to shout: "I know that place!"

Not to mention my home town, you can browse street view of Karrebæksminde, Denmark, now. Amazingly that seems less familiar, but then of course I have not lived there since I was 18 (nearly thirty years ago), so it's bound to have changed a lot.
I mean, I've visited, of course, but not enough to make it intimately familiar in its current form. It's been modernized a lot, more open and clean in the lines.

Wow, it really is amazingly different. It gives me a really strange sensation, which I've felt before once when I visited my childhood street and it did not seem familiar at all... a sort of feeling of... unreality or something. Not unpleasant, just very odd. Does anybody know that?

... Man, I lived on that beach in the summer as a kid. Well, before I learned to read for serious anyway. (Funny, they forgot to blur the man's head for some reason.)

Wow, the more I look... this is the entrance to the street where I grew up, and I can't describe to you how alien it looks to me. To the point where I'm actually wondering if they actually have not just renovated the houses, but actually rebuilt them! I think one has to look long and hard (and have photos or an unusually good memory) to find any details at all which are the same from my childhood.

It should probably be obvious to me that things change, so I guess I've been so involved in my own life that I have never really thought much about this before. Live and learn.

... Well, hey, found a couple of buildings, especially the one one the right, which look pretty much like they did!


And of course, I should have realized: the buildings on this old, central street are generally classified in the highest order, so outwardly they look pretty much like in my childhood. My granddad and father used to have a paint store right in the middle of this picture (next to the canal), and one of my childhood bud's grandmother used to live in the red house.

Above: something really familiar! That wooden gate has been the same for over fifty years! :-)

Boom, and we're back in Copenhagen for no good reason! I used to live in one small room, in my twenties, at the top there, with three other young men, in near-poverty (or at least none of us ever had any cash), here in central Copenhagen (district Vesterbro). Now I'm probably way past the point where anybody cares anymore. :-)

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See below how street view is made, using a camera/man cyborg.
I like that they use film, and print the pictures, and then scan the prints! You just can't trust those newfangled digital cameras...
(OK, on second look it does not scan as such, merely spot licence plates and such. But amazingly, these streets are free of humans!)



I'm just realizing one use of Street View can be to location-scout for street photography, for somebody like me who does not have a car. A bit feeble, but I'm not sure how many uses it has otherwise, but it must have some, for them to make such a huge effort.

Update: They have to do it over in Japan, due to too many backyards been covered, the cameras are too tall. Ouch!
It's interesting that they have so many problems, because so far as I know, very few countries have laws against photographing in public.


It's gotta be a tough job driving those cars. When it's not just boring...


"Most recently we've added a new vehicle to our fleet that we call the "Trike." We basically took the same technology in our Street View cars and towed them behind a 3-wheeled tricycle in a device reminiscent of an ice cream cart. The Trike lets us reach areas not accessible by car, such as hiking trails, biking trails and college campuses, just to name a few." - Google article.