You know how frustrating it is when you just miss the postman and he leaves one of those cards saying that he’s taken the parcel back to the Sorting Office? Well, my wife offered to collect the parcel, but I said no, I would collect it myself as I could look for some photo opportunities during the trip.

I had photographs waiting to be edited, but there had been a slight fall of snow during the night, and I felt I may see something. In my part of the world snow isn’t guaranteed to last for very long, so when it falls you have to make the most of it.

The Sorting Office is on an industrial estate outside of town, surrounded by farmland, so I thought I might get some shots of bare leafless trees and white fields. As it happened the snow wasn’t as thick as I’d hoped, and the images I’d imagined didn’t materialise. I took a few landscape images, but there was too much green grass visible to give the desolate look I’d wanted.

Anyway, I also needed to buy something in my local town centre and thought there may be some pictures there. I remembered an old building with boarded up broken windows so I decided to drive part for a look. It’s been a couple of years since my last visit and I thought it may have deteriorated slightly. It turned out that the windows were a bit more broken and a bit more boarded up on the inside with old doors and random bits of wood. There was also some barbed wire around the top of the wall that I hadn’t noticed before. All good Crime / Thriller images.

Best of all though, in the yard at the front of the building someone had dumped some rubbish, and among the debris was a single shoe, lying on rough grass and partly covered in snow. Crime, Abduction, Struggle, Kidnap, Murder…..I imagine I’m not the only Book Cover Photographer who thinks in Keywords when confronted with something interesting.

You couldn’t set something like this up. Well you could, if you knew that it was going to snow and you could leave one of your wife’s shoes out in the garden overnight. That’s a bit risky though, so coming across a “natural” shot like this is a bonus.

Another bonus of the day was a 1950’s wire mesh chair dumped among a pile of old fire extinguishers. It looks like a Harry Bertoia “Style” side chair, but it’s probably a cheap knock off. Either way it came home with me to be added to my stock of props for later use.

As is often the case, plans and ideas didn’t come to fruition, but something else turned up. Next day all the snow was gone, but I’ll be back the factory in a few months the to see what else had been dumped.

View Richard Nixon’s Portfolio on the Arcangel site