Raoul Pop

A little more than a week ago, I wrote about the National Seminary at Forest Glen, here in the DC suburbs, and also posted some photos I took there this summer. I promised I’d post the rest of the photos, which I took in the summer of 2005, and I held true to that promise.

I can safely say I have no more photos to post from the site, since it’s being redeveloped as I write this, and will soon look different. The old buildings will stand no more, but will be replaced by their modern counterparts, which will supposedly look and feel the same. We’ll see how that turns out… So, you may call these photos “limited edition”. I can’t get you any more. Enjoy them, and visit the site sometime next year if you’re able. You may or may not recognize the spots in the photos, depending on how extensive the redevelopment will be.

To help you understand the layout of the site, I’ve posted a map of the grounds below. I also invite you to visit the National Seminary website (which may or may not be up for long — that’s where I got the map). The site has photos of bygone times, showing you how the grounds and buildings looked when they were actually in use. It’s very interesting stuff, and my advice is to spend one of these chilly autumn evenings curled up with your laptop on the sofa, reading through it.

What I did this time is that I not only organized all of the photos taken there in a smart set and geotagged them with their exact location (within several feet, anyway), but I also added portals to them. Portals are a really cool feature on Zooomr, and through a portal, a user can place a clickable link to another photo from a photo. You select the location, how big the portal is, and where it links. What’s really nice is that within that little link, a tiny thumbnail of the image where you’ll be taken is displayed, so you can tell where you’re going. It’s really cool, it’s like getting teleported to a new location. Smile all you want, but it’ll feel like you got teleported — some portals link between photos taken in 2005 and 2006, and Ligia and I wore different clothes on the two occasions, not to mention that we had different hairstyles. You’ll feel like you just traveled back in time! I added lots of portals to these photos, and I invite you to explore as many as you can — you probably won’t get through all of them in one sitting. The full set is available here, and I included some photos from this batch below to get you started. (If you can’t see them, refer to this post.) Enjoy!

Updated 10/7/2007: I left that text up there just to show you how much of my content Zooomr has destroyed through their complete lack of concern for user sets and user effort in general. I’d done all this work to tag and organize my photos, and all those sets became unavailable when they put out their supposed “upgrade” to Mark III. Just goes to show you that no one should rely on a beta site for any sort of important content, no matter what the founders say, and no matter what promises are made.

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