Success!

It’s a fantastic Thursday afternoon!

The weather? Oh, it’s raining and overcast with a mid-40’s touch.

What makes it fantastic, is that the first set of photographs we sent to NPR’s project, Mapping Main Street were published into their "Main Street" slideshow.

When you click on the participate tab on their website, it brings up a slideshow on the right of the page and that’s where our photos are currently. Here’s a link to that page: Mapping Main Street 'Participate'

The site editor has not linked our photos to the category “Ellensburg, WA” so if you currently type in the city’s name into their search function, there is one photo from the EDA.

We are not sure what the time frame is on that task on their site, but seeing as their slideshow has the photos, it’s probably only a matter of time before we see our photos linked to “Ellensburg, WA.”

Stefanie started a Flickr account as well, and started uploading pictures that we have edited. It will take some time to edit every photo, but we are moving as fast as we can, and we will upload them as soon as they are ready. Here’s a link to her photo stream: Stefanie's Photo Stream

Today we also were able to complete our photography of Flirt/West Coast Men’s and Cedar Mountain Woodwrights. Matt ended up conducting an impromptu interview with Cedar Mountain’s owner Mike Bello, and was able to gather a lot of knowledge on the challenges a woodworker in today’s business climate faces.

We were able to photograph half of the Palace Cafe, and will be shooting the other half on another day, when there are less patrons. While we want to highlight the businesses are doing well, we don’t want to interrupt commerce with our project either.

We shot the front half of Ace Apparel’s store yesterday, but we will return next Tuesday to complete photography. They are remodeling some of their store, and also the store front, so we will re-shoot their business, and then publish those photos. It will be an interesting twist to the story we are putting together, showing a business before a remodel, and then after.

We are now moving into preliminary interviews, and have several lined up starting tomorrow and into next week.

These interviews will give us a framework for what kinds of questions we will be asking each business owner/representative.

We will also want to solicit some commentary from the general public, and we will update this blog when finalize the plan for that part of the project.

Happy Thursday, see you tomorrow!