When I first started taking photos of Near Southeast more than six years ago, I had no grand plan. Every few months, I went out and snapped a few shots here or there, rarely ever even getting out of the car. As time went on and development projects got underway, I found a methodology that worked for me--stand on each corner of an intersection and in the crosswalks, and take the same angles. This allowed me to build the automated displays of before-and-afters, where I'd pick the best of the "before" angles of a certain location (even if that photo wasn't necessarily the oldest one in my collection showing that angle) and then focus on replicating that angle as construction progressed.

City Paper's new Best of DC issue is out, and their staff picks include one for Best Local Web Site, where Brightest Young Things is marked as best, but another site gets all the verbiage: "Credit JDLand with thoroughness. If there is a development--however puny, however bureaucratic--regarding the commercial and residential layout of near Southeast D.C., this site may well break the news and will certainly have all the analysis and documents behind it. The site's blog items refresh very regularly and there are cool interactive maps and the like. JDLand, in fact, might just deserve a higher ranking, if only it weren't so nasty." The entry goes on to target my list of highlighted-in-red items on my contact page as the chief example of my nastiness. Perhaps Erik would like to serve as frontline secretary for my inbox without all of those caveats (which I have always considered to be wry, not nasty), and I'd like to think that the people who do contact me via that page get a pretty nice response 99.99% of the time. But oh well. I still very much appreciate the pick.