by mahalie, 2006/05/19

I feel confident guessing there are millions of photographs of the Space Needle littering personal photo albums, office desks and on Seattle tourist paraphenalia everywhere.* As Seattle’s most prominent and well known skyline feature, both tourists and locals can’t help but shoot the thing. You can view the Space Needle from myriad perspectives at Flickr, the popular community-driven photo sharing site, and in addition to being a frequent star of various Seattle photo groups, there is a Flickr photo pool dedicated to just the Space Needle.

I’ve seen the Needle from all sorts of angles, with all sorts of skies, in every light. I thought I’d seen it nearly every way possible, until I saw Ckwinny’s clever photo of its crazy refletion in the Allen-funded Ghery-designed rock museum called the Experience Music Project.

*Suprisingly, a Google image search returned only 21,800 items and only 6,400 on Flickr. As an interesting side note, a comparison of the search popularity of the most iconic US structures - the Space Needle, Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Buidling, St. Louis Arch and the Chrysler Building shows us right in the middle, according to Google Trends. The Empire State Building, one of the seven wonders of the world (according to the ASCE) is clearly the most searched for, we’ve caught up with the Golden Gate Bridge a couple of times; the Space Needle’s google popularity has remained pretty consistent the past few years and it manages to stay fairly more sought out than the Chrysler Building and the St. Louis Arch. Not too shabby…