POTD: Abandoned Supermarket in Melbourne, Australia

 

    The source of these photographs was from a 2018 article entitled "From packets of Peter Jackson cigarettes to rows of abandoned checkouts: Eerie photographs show a Coles supermarket frozen in time since it closed nine years ago" and published by the Daily Mail. 

    While I typically pick a photograph for this series based on how interesting is the subject, for those involving ruins, I also hope to show what a survivor of an apocalypse might expect as far as the condition of a ruined building post-SHTF--perhaps many years after--and perhaps prompt additional thought even if nothing more than asking yourself "where could a sniper be hiding?" or "how would I approach this structure?" 

    Modern supermarkets are built around the idea of plentiful electricity for interior lighting so even when they have broad expanses of windows, these windows will be at the front of the structure while it will generally be much darker farther into the structure. For big box stores, the issue will be even more pronounced since the only windows will generally be around the entrance(s) with even less natural light reaching the interior. 

    Since the photographer had multiple photographs, I picked the two that best showed this lighting dichotomy. The top photograph is from deep in the interior looking toward the front windows and shows how anyone entering the store from the front would be easily visible--highlighted against the light--to anyone deeper in the store. The bottom photograph taken from just inside the store highlights the opposite problem to someone entering the building from the front: although the immediate area behind the windows is well lit, it is difficult to make out anything deeper in the structure.