Techniques

Shooting From the Road /  by Todd Henson

There is a particular photographic technique, or perhaps style of photography, that I don’t practice often but have thoroughly enjoyed each time I have. And that is shooting from the road, from a moving vehicle. But before we get ahead of ourselves, lets get the required warning out of the way: Please only do this as a passenger. Never shoot from the road while driving. Seems pretty obvious, right?

Panning From the Road: Farm and Motion Blur

Farm from the road

My earliest successful attempt at shooting from the road might have been a short day trip my brother and I took many years back. While driving down a road I was taken by the scene of a farm and the green fields in front of it, so I had my brother drive back and forth several times. There was no one else on this road so we didn’t get in anyone’s way. What I was hoping for was a panned image where the barn and silos were sharply in focus but the green fields closer to the car were blurred from the motion of driving by them. I was remembering as a kid how much I enjoyed staring out the side window of a car watching the blurred fields beside the road. I wanted to capture something of this in a photograph.

This was a challenging photo to create. I needed a fast enough shutter speed, and good enough panning technique, to get the barn and silos in focus. But I needed a slow enough shutter speed to capture the motion blur of the nearby field. That’s why I had my brother drive back and forth several times so I could experiment with settings until I found something that worked for me. In the end I used the following lens/camera settings: 105mm, ISO 200, f/18, 1/20 sec.

A quick note on panning, if you’re not familiar with it. Panning is where you move your camera, tracking your subject as the subject moves (or in this case as we moved past the subject). It requires a steady hand if you’re using a slow shutter speed. It takes a lot of practice but it’s worth it, and lots of fun. Give it a try if you haven’t.

Panning From the Road: House in Focus

House from the road

Another example of panning from the road was of an attractive house my father and I saw as we were driving by on our way back from a visit to Blandy Experimental Farm. This time we didn’t drive back and forth, so I needed to get it right the first time. I wasn’t looking for blurred fields or grass, just capturing a nice image of the house and its lawn, so I used a much faster shutter speed. I shot a quick burst of frames as we passed by, panning with the house from the passenger side of the car. I had no idea at the time if I captured a decent image, but when I got home I was very pleased with the results. Here are the lens/camera settings I used: 80mm, ISO 400, f/8, 1/500 sec.

Shooting the Road Ahead

On the road

Another obvious way to shoot from a moving car is to photograph the road ahead. You still have options here as far as whether you want to capture some motion blur at the sides of the road or whether you want to try to freeze all motion. In my case for each of these I opted to mostly freeze all motion, so I used faster shutter speeds. I like the perspective these photos give, facing forward with the road in front, sometimes visible far into the distance. I think there’s an aspect of storytelling to it. Here are the lens/camera settings I used for the photographs below: 58 - 80mm, ISO 400, f/8.0, 1/640 sec.

Driving through the hills

On target at mile marker 100

Tips

One of the most important tips for shooting from the road is to experiment, try different settings, see how they affect the look of the image. You can introduce intentional blur, or you can try to reduce all blur and create sharp images, or some combination of them both. Try experimenting with depth of field. I really didn’t pay too much attention with that in these photos, but it’s an option you have.

This tip applies in just about any circumstance: practice! Panning can be a challenge so it’s worth practicing any chance you get. You can practice closer to home by tracking a bird in flight or a car in motion. Try to move the camera such that you keep the subject directly on the focus point.

Another tip is to use the vibration reduction feature of your lens or camera if they have it. This can help reduce some of the natural vibration you’ll encounter from the vehicle and help you get sharp images (if that’s what you’re trying for).

It might be a good idea to wash the windows of the car before setting out, especially if they’re very dirty. I’ll be honest, though, I didn’t do that for any of these photos.

Have you ever tried shooting from the road? What were your experiences? And if you haven’t tried this, do you think you will in the future? Let me know in the comments below.

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Painterly Pursuits in Photography /  by Todd Henson

I was thinking about how sometimes painters create paintings that could be mistaken for photographs. And that naturally led me to thinking about how photographers sometimes create photographs that could be mistaken for paintings. And from there I began pondering some of the ways a photograph might be made to look painterly, many of which would involve heavy post-processing, likely using Photoshop to craft a painting out of a photo. But I also thought about the various ways a photograph could be made painterly mostly in camera with any post-processing occurring strictly in Lightroom.

And so I sought out a few photographs that I’d created with a more painterly intent, ones I’d not yet processed, and took them through Lightroom to finish them. Most of the post-processing is similar in nature to that I do with any other photograph, adjusting exposure, highlights, shadows, white and black points, white balance, color balance, etc. The majority of what makes these photos painterly was done in camera. I did, however, make adjustments in Lightroom that might be considered overkill for a typical photograph, things like over-saturating colors or pushing texture too much in one direction or the other (affecting contrast in interesting ways).

Trees in Autumn

The first photo used a simple technique to distort the scene, giving it the impression of paint brushed onto a canvas. How was it done? Some of you may guess by looking at the photo. I found a pond surrounded by bright autumn foliage and pointed the camera at the reflections in the water and experimented with various shutter speeds to see the different looks they gave. Some seemed to give the impression of brushed on paint, and in post processing I accentuated that by adjusting the contrast in various ways (texture, highlights, shadows, white and black point, etc). I also flipped the photo so the sky was at the top, as we’d see in the scene or a painting, but the opposite of what we typically see reflected in a pond.

Autumnal Abstract

For the second photo I once again took advantage of the reflections of the colorful autumn foliage, but this time I decided to go with a more abstract composition. I focused in on a small patch of color and patterns and zoomed in enough you can’t as easily tell what the subject is. Instead it’s just a painting about color and pattern. And this being the case I had no problem adjusting some of the colors in Lightroom, making some of them brighter and more vibrant.

Fiery Fall Foliage

Finally, for the third photo I decided to include the actual scene instead of just reflections. But I still wanted a painterly look. Thankfully, the scene, itself, had a painterly look to it with the late afternoon sun lighting up some of the colorful leaves across the pond. I was also creating a number of long exposures, letting any breeze slightly blur the leaves, while also sometimes experimenting with moving the zoom or focus ring during the exposure. If you move the zoom ring during exposure you can create some interesting streaks and blurs as you actually zoom into or out of the scene. By moving the focus ring during exposure you can similarly create some interesting blurs as you capture things in and out of focus at the same time. In this particular case I don’t think I moved either zoom or focus rings, instead just letting the breeze move some of the leaves around for the 1 second exposure. I then made further adjustments in Lightroom that contributed to the slightly blurry feel, and made some creative exposure adjustments beyond the already brightly illuminated foliage.

All of these photos also took advantage of a Singh-Ray Gold-n-Blue polarizing filter to shift and accentuate the colors even more. The trip to this pond was all about experimenting, about trying to use various techniques to alter the look and feel of the images, and in some cases perhaps creating photographs with a more painterly feel. I’ll let you decide whether or not I was successful.

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Turbulence in Motion /  by Todd Henson

On a recent walk through the woods I felt the pull to try something different, to experiment with a style of photography I don’t often practice, something more abstract and dynamic. I decided to use intentional panning of the camera to create motion blurred images of static scenes, something I’ve seen other photographers do but haven’t very often tried myself.

Horizontal panning, where you move the camera in a relatively straight line left and or right, is sometimes used to create beautifully abstract images of shorelines where there’s nothing distinct or recognizable in the photo but instead just a blur of lines and colors. The closet I can easily come to shoreline is along a creek or river, so that’s what I decided to try first. I experimented using longer or shorter shutter speeds, and I tried moving the camera both left and right during an exposure, as well as just moving left or just moving right. It was fascinating seeing all the various effects this created.

Inside Saturn

In this first image I swung back and forth very quickly, never stopping my motion. I was using a wide angle lens, 16 mm, and I was fairly close to the creek, so when I panned back and forth it created curved instead of straight lines. At first I’d considered trying to straighten them in software, but instead I decided to accentuate the curves by distorting them even more. To do this, instead of choosing my specific lens in Lightroom’s profile section I chose a GoPro lens profile, which created a more fisheye view. I also adjusted some of the colors, making them more saturated. I figured, there’s nothing real or recognizable in this, so no reason to stick strictly to what I saw.

Another fascinating effect you can create is when you’re panning but you slow down enough, or even stop for brief moments during the exposure. This created the image below, where there is still plenty of motion blur, but you can also see some of the scene, the creek below, the far banks and the trees of the forest beyond. Using the same techniques in slightly different ways can give vastly different results.

Creekside Flashbacks

Focusing downward, on the moving water of the creek and small sections of disturbance, while still panning horizontally, created the following image. I imagine it as a closeup of the storms on Jupiter with the beautiful bands of colored clouds, storms raging within. The browns at the top are from the bank on the other side of the creek. They are very streaked and blurred from the motion. Interestingly, the moving water has a very different look than the bank. Some of the water closest to the lens seems to have very little motion blur to it, while a small section of disturbed water flowing over rocks takes on the form of the white storm clouds.

Storms on Jupiter

You can also pan vertically, up and down. As with the horizontal panning, you can pan both up and down in a single exposure, or pan just upward or just downward, each creating different effects. How fast you pan and when and where you start panning also make a difference. Below are two examples of panning vertically at a stretch of trees. The first includes some of the sky, whereas the second is of the forested hillside but stops just as it hits the sky.

Dancing Trees

Hillside

Finally, on the way out I decided to try the horizontal panning technique with the road. I love this effect. It gives the feel of being in a car looking out a window at the road and scenery flying by. And yet here, I was standing in one place and panning my camera along the road. With most exposures the road was blurry, but in this one I managed to capture the painted lines relatively well focused. It might have been interesting to do this as a car went by, panning with the car.

The Road in Motion

If these techniques are new to you then give them a try sometime. The key is creating slow enough shutter speeds to let you move the camera during the exposure. To do this you can lower your ISO as low as your camera allows and stop down your aperture until you get slow enough shutter speeds. In the case of these images I used ISO 100, apertures between f/18 and f/22, and shutter speeds of 1/20 to 1.3 seconds. The rest is all about moving your camera. And you don’t need to restrict yourself to horizontal or vertical movement, you could also rotate it or move it in various directions. Experiment!

One final comment on post-processing these. By using such small apertures you will begin to notice sensor dust in your images. That’s an unfortunate side effect of small apertures, the depth of field is so great you start to see actual dust accumulated on your camera sensor. This is easy enough to get rid of in software, but you should know to look for it. You’d think with photographs this abstract it wouldn’t be a concern, and yet it really stood out in some places.

I had a lot of fun creating these images. Sometimes experimenting and using techniques you usually don’t can be an exhilarating experience, giving you new ways to look at the world around you, new ways to visualize the sorts of photographs you’re capable of creating. I hope you’ve enjoyed this, and I hope it inspires you to try your own experiments.

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