Another in my occasional series documenting the small shops that make up our urban landscape before they disappear or get redeveloped. Sole Obsession, the shoe store on the corner, for instance, has had a varied history. You can only see it as a slight projection from the wall above the awning at the scale that this will appear on the web, but that projection is a cow's head. It's safe to say that at one time this was a butcher's shop. At the time that I moved here it was a video rentals store. You can imagine how that turned out. (Though surprisingly one still survives for now in the southern part of the village. For now. I'd better grab a shot of that soon.) Then of course it became a shoe store.

I'm thinking that one shop at a time isn't going to be fast enough to capture changes like this so periodically I'm going to resort to panos. In this case it's a pano of the main Thirroul village shopping area. This is made up of three portrait oriented shots, all at f/5.6, ISO 400, with speeds between 1/400th on the left, 1/800th in the centre and 1/1000th on the right where there is more sun hitting.

I've also intentionally made it an off-centre pano first because the power lines and poles are a pain in the butt, and second because I wanted to see what it would look like. And... yes, I don't mind the effect. Arguably it wastes a lot of detail in the foreground given the amount of space used by the road, though I could crop that if I wanted to. (There would still be the issue that the buildings on the far side of the intersection have half the pixel height than the ones to the left of frame, though, which is the biggest weakness of this framing.) Indeed I chose portrait rather than landscape orientation to shoot, since in a pano stitch you run out of sky and foreground long before you run out of horizontal content.

So why this place? Because I know for a fact that this is a place that will change very, very soon. But we'll come back to that one in tomorrow's PAD.