The industrial estate in winter.

The thing that I never set out to do, is produce a set of images from the same location with the same style of processing. This is not down to anything other than I like to treat each image as an individual piece, I do this from the start, in my mind when I take the photograph. Part of the enjoyment I have in my work is rediscovering the images after a shoot, when they are in my screen and I have a large cup of tea in my hand. If I have been given a brief by my client, then what follows is tailored, and if not, I simply create.

Last week, I reorganised my catalogue of images and archived some old portfolios. This of course lead to the rediscovery of some old locations and I think I lost hours emerged in beautiful colours and scenes, it reminded me a little of tidying my room as child and the excitement of finding forgotten treasures hidden under my bed. As part of this tidy up, I split a personal portfolio based on a town into locations in that town, and I found that over a long period of time dipping in and out of this, that I had indeed created a location set where all the images had a similar theme.

The location was a small industrial estate in Stockport, no big manufacturing, just smaller units, smaller businesses, set off a main road. It had been snowing lightly for a few days and as soon as it had stopped, I headed out and walked, unintentionally finding this wonderful place. I can’t remember what day it was, only that there were few places open, not sure if it was due to the snow or maybe it was a weekend, but it was very peaceful. I spent hours wandering, my nose pinking at the end and my fingertips growing numb, but under a thin blanket of snow the place was so beautiful.