Manchester based professional photographer | Neil Downie

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Motorway Service Stations Project

I've been doing some further work on my M6 service stations project over the last couple of days. Now that I've submitted most of my A-level stuff I've got a bit more time to play with so I've been pursuing this again. I had wanted to capture the emptiness and the lonesomeness of the service stations at night, but the sunrise got the better of me. I was out the door for just after 3 and headed down to Stafford services, but by the time I got there (about 3:45am), the light was already changing. Once I'd got there I also realised that these particular services are not really what I was looking for anyway - they're far too leafy and "pleasant", so I opted to work my way up the Northbound carriageway and visited Keele, Sandbach (where I got turfed off), Knutsford (where both these shots were taken), Lymm truck stop, and Charnock Richards. All in all it was a relatively successful trip. The light once the sun had appeared was fantastic so I just kept shooting eventually calling it a day about 8am. I'm glad I did as the image above and the one below I'm really pleased with.Even though the light wasn't what I had planned for, I have still managed to capture the feeling I was looking for. I got around half a dozen keepers but I'll save posting the rest until the body of work has more depth.