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Photo Essay Blitz Outtakes 2003
Another thing you'll find in this section is a selection of movies that I shot at various locations over the course of the week. The interesting thing about the movies is that it offers a look into what I was thinking at the time the pictures were taken, as well as a few amusing moments, and some unexpected movie bloopers...
Wait a second... are we supposed to park or not? As it turns out, no. The bus bays at King Street were under renovation, thus putting the bus lanes in what normally would be the metered parking spaces.
On King Street in Alexandria, they were getting ready to have a parade, complete with an American flag suspended from two fire truck ladders.
One abandoned concept was a visit to the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, where I took the tower tour. This took me from the first floor level all the way up to the observation deck on the ninth floor. In these pictures, you're looking at the Grotto Room (left) and the Knights Templar. In the Grotto Room picture, M.O.V.P.E.R. stands for "Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm".
What I did end up using out of the pictures that I took at the memorial were the observation deck photos. They became part of An Urban Comparison, DC Area. This picture is zoomed out more than the ones that got used, in order to put the views in perspective. This shows the Masonic emblem and the rest of Shooters Hill.
Welcome to Hains Point, home of The Awakening.
The Ballston Metro station is empty! Kinda creepy...
The empty Metro station brings to mind a TV commercial...
The faregates at Vienna ate my farecard! This had never happened to me before...
The area around the Canal Walk is certainly NOT a quiet place!
Another abandoned concept was to pay a visit to Belle Isle. I crossed over the Belle Isle Footbridge (seen at left). However, upon arrival at Belle Isle, I found nothing really worth photographing, and so I left fairly soon after arriving. However, the footbridge itself afforded me some amazing views of the Richmond skyline, which showed up in An Urban Comparison, Richmond.
In Richmond, after crossing through the business district, I returned to Shockoe Bottom, where I parked the car. I walked down Cary Street to get back, and the section of Shockoe Bottom I walked through reminded me of Old Town in Alexandria, but with a certain Richmond flair to it. Note the streets are cobblestone, and not asphalt. I was going to do a photo set on this area, but the concept was abandoned mainly due to lighting. Because it was shot in the late afternoon, the set was doomed by shadows as a result of the sun's position. As you can see, the shadows were intense, and in order to properly see what was in shadow, you end up overexposing what's not.
The hotel! Interestingly enough, I was put in the exact same room that I was in last year, room 311.
The room was almost exactly as I remembered it. The only change was that this year, the covers were pulled slightly back to expose the pillows.
This photograph was an experiment regarding long-exposure water shots, taken in Norfolk outside Nauticus as warm-up for the day. I think I overexposed it just a bit...
I lament the rain in this movie...
At the Waterside on the lower level is a Hooters restaurant. My little fun goal for the week was actually to visit a Hooters restaurant for every city I visited that had one. For the Washington DC segment I visited the Hooters on Rixlew Lane in Manassas. In Richmond, I visited the West Broad Street location. Then in Norfolk, shown here, I visited the "Norfolk II" location at the Waterside.
Even out by Lake Moomaw, the place to answer nature's call is convenient, if not always fresh-smelling, as evidenced by this set of port-a-potties.
The overlook at Lake Moomaw was another concept that was thrown out due to time constraints. If the overlook had been more obvious as to where it was, it might have happened, but I just plain couldn't find it, and didn't really have time to look for it.
Welcome to Lake Moomaw, and enjoy my rather lame jokes.
I was originally going to include downtown Covington (left) and Clifton Forge in An Urban Comparison, but ultimately abandoned the idea due to the large difference in size and character compared to the other cities that were going to be featured.
This is downtown Covington!
Here we are in Downtown Roanoke, as I explain the difference between the First Union Building and the First Union Tower.
A pedestal, all that remains of one station of an old municipal fire alarm system. This is all the way across downtown from the fully-intact street box that I photographed in 2002.
Blooper! Watch as I totally mess up a building's name...
A new addition to the Discovery Center at Mill Mountain Park was the Stopper covers on the fire alarm pull-stations. Turns out that the reason they put covers on them was to prevent little children from pulling them, which had become a rather big problem.
Inside, a woman makes the Discovery Center beautiful with a new mural on the wall.
An alternate shot of the couple at the overlook...
And at the end of the day, another trip to Hooters, this time in Roanoke. One thing about this bunch was that everyone's shirt said something different. From left to right, these Hooters girls were from Virginia Beach, Hampton, Roanoke, Winston-Salem, and Baltimore.
At Monticello, this chimney stands tall, braced slightly.
And lastly, my "Photo Manifest", which was my list of things to take pictures of. Yes, I planned this out quite thoroughly... |
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Just like in 2002, I took a lot of pictures during my Photo Essay Blitz week - 2,860 in 2003. Some of them went into the twelve photo sets in Photography that comprised 2003's Photo Essay Blitz. Other groups of photos were shot for concepts that were ultimately abandoned, some of which you'll find here. Others were simply points of interest, like an amusing image, a pretty picture, or just something that went on separate from the main mission.
