Last spring, as usual, I had to swap out my winter tires for summer ones. This chore usually goes like this: I check in at the tire shop, wait 1 to 1.5 hours, then come back, pay, and get my car back.
The wait is usually boring, because… waiting is boring, I guess. So this time I decided to bring my camera along and see what would happen.
The tire shop sits in an industrial area not far from home – basically a sprawl of warehouses, an IKEA, a home improvement center, a few outlet-style shops, that sort of thing. The place is ugly. There’s no way around it. This is not Piazza del Duomo. If anything, it looked like the wrong location to photograph.
And yet, I found beauty. The sunlight, to be honest, was gorgeous – soft and low, casting long, dramatic shadows. The atmosphere was strangely quiet, almost nobody around, so I could explore undisturbed and without raising eyebrows.
In the end, I came home with new tires – and a bunch of photos of a place I’d bet nobody has ever bothered to photograph. Turns out the wrong location was exactly right.