These photos could have been taken anywhere…
February 28, 2020, 8:30 AM
While on an outing on Thursday, I stopped to photograph the former Walmart store in Leesburg, Virginia. I had been planning a photo shoot here ever since the store closed in May 2019, upon the opening of a new Supercenter store elsewhere in the Leesburg area. I was drawn to this location because, unlike a lot of former Walmart stores, this one left a massive labelscar on the building due to repaintings over the years, as revealed in photos taken by Aaron Stone. Other Walmarts that closed have had lesser labelscars, and Walmart has also been known to paint out their labelscars. But this one had “WAL★MART” still easily readable in blue. I felt something of a sense of urgency in getting down to this location, because who knows how long a former Walmart will sit idle. Other former Walmart stores in the DC area have been scooped up relatively quickly, such as the former Manassas Walmart, which was quickly converted to other uses. So who knew how long this might remain in this form.
Arriving on site, I couldn’t have gotten better shooting conditions. The skies were partly cloudy, with only a small amount of cloud cover, which worked to my benefit. Completely clear skies make for slightly bluish photos that need to be color corrected in post-production, while partly cloudy skies tend to lend to more accurate colors that require less work at the computer. My only complaint about the conditions was that it was cold and windy, which was not fun to shoot in. By the time I finished this shoot, which took about 25 minutes to do, I was quite cold. It took me some time to warm back up once I got back in the car.
Continue reading…Categories: Loudoun County, Walmart
The remodeling of a Walmart store…
February 19, 2020, 4:33 PM
Back in 2005, I was living in my parents’ house and working for Walmart. I tended to go out a bit after work in order to unwind, and when I did, I would usually do a circuit that took me from my store in Waynesboro up Afton Mountain, down the Blue Ridge Parkway as far south as Route 60, go west on Route 60 to Lexington, and then head back home via I-81. When I did this, the Walmart in Lexington tended to be one of my stops, as it was a logical place to get up, walk around, and shop if I needed to (I didn’t like shopping at my own store because I didn’t feel like a customer there, nor was I treated like a real customer). For a few months that year, Walmart remodeled that store from the late-1990s design that it was given when it was expanded to a Supercenter to the then-current store design, which was the mid-2000s black signage with brown walls. For some reason, I documented this remodel throughout the process via cell phone photos. So here it is. Forgive the quality, because cell phone cameras at the time didn’t take much better photos than a potato, and using Big Mavica would have been too obvious.
A Facebook comment should not bother me this much…
February 11, 2020, 11:11 AM
Recently, I commented on a post on the Facebook page for WHSV, the local ABC affiliate for Harrisonburg, Virginia, and got some unusual feedback. The original post was for an article about Trump’s participation in the “March for Life“, an anti-choice demonstration held annually in DC on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
Before I continue, though, it seems worthwhile to explain my stance on the matter of abortion. My stance is that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. But ultimately, it’s not my call. What other people do with their bodies is their business, and it doesn’t affect me.
I also believe that abortion is more or less a settled matter, but that it has value for the GOP as a campaign issue. In other words, the Republican Party will talk a big game about it, but ultimately, no one is going to ban abortion. Ever. Why ban it and settle the matter decisively in your favor, when you can bring it up as a campaign issue every election cycle and raise money and get people to vote based on it? To actually ban abortion would be to kill the golden goose, and also hand a massive fundraising opportunity to the Democrats. Maybe I’m a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I imagine that if they were really going to act on that issue, they would have done it by now, during the various periods where the GOP has controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. That they haven’t done that tells me that they are not interested in settling it.
Categories: Middle school, National politics, Social media, Stuarts Draft