Onlooker

It’s just not cool to simply photograph the Google Street View car any more. And finding yourself on Street View is just so passé.

The trick now is to photograph the Street View car and match it up with the photo it takes of you.

You may remember that last summer I was strolling along Cleveland Street in search of some lunch, when the fabled Google Street car passed me, and looped the block. Indeed, I offered a drink to the first person to spot me.

It looks like I might have to buy myself that drink. Here’s a photo I took:

IMG_0362

and here is me, about three seconds after taking it:

Googled

Check out Google itself for the full picture. If you look to the right you’ll see that chap in the white shirt has passed the pale concrete slab, and on the left those two pigeons have taken off in the time between my shot, and the Street View.

Hah. Gotcha, Google.

About rpg

Scientist, poet, gadfly
This entry was posted in Internet, Me. Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Onlooker

  1. Cath Ennis says:

    That.
     
    Is.
     
    AWESOME.
     
    Beats even the photo of my friend taking a photo of her house (to show a relative in NZ what her new garden looks like) with her back to the Google Streetview car. I thought that was delightfully meta.
     
    Unfortunately, the car I saw didn’t seem to capture my image. Even more unfortunately, Google (the cat) was not sitting in her customary position in the front window when the Google car came past our house.

  2. Richard P. Grant says:

     That would have been cool. Eva says (on facebook) that she saw me crossing the street, tweeting. I’ll have to look for that (the Cleveland Mews sequence of photos was taken at a different time from the surrounding streets, oddly enough).

  3. Brian Clegg says:

    Impressive, Richard. Though possibly indicative of a man with too much time on his hands.

  4. Richard P. Grant says:

     It was summer, and the living was easy.

  5. Heather Etchevers says:

    That is really neat! I wonder how many other onlooker-craning-neck photos there are, and if certain with-it cities have more than others? (Like, I always thought for some reason that the camera was built into some sort of special Batman-like vehicle, and would hardly have noticed that clever outfit.)

  6. Richard P. Grant says:

     That’s funny—because I thought a car driving round with a TREE stuck on top was pretty obvious. Some special batman-like vehicle might have drawn less attention, at least here in London.

  7. Cath Ennis says:

    Yeah, I wasn’t quite sure if I was seeing the Google car, or the first wave of the Dalek invasion.

  8. Richard P. Grant says:

     Oh. Perhaps Google is mapping the world… FOR THE DALEKS!!

  9. Matt Brown says:

    Google have captured your soul. Burn them. They’re a witch.
    I hadn’t realised they were updating the UK images. Cool.

Comments are closed.