Shooting the Landscape at 70 Miles an Hour
Is it even possible? For years the idea of landscape photography was to put your camera on a tripod, frame very carefully, then wait for the light to be perfect before you shot. But what if you had to do everything in exactly the opposite way?
Recently I traveled from Chicago to Santa Fe. We had to drive 1300 miles in four days and that meant we would usually be going about 70MPH. It seemed crazy to me to imagine I could take pictures along the way but just for fun I brought my camera along — and this is what happened next.
We pulled out of Chicago on a grey afternoon, heading west. A few hours later, cruising on Interstate 72, I started paying attention to the scenery passing by. Hmmm, that’s interesting, it was an industrial landscape with trucks, cars, and smokestacks, the ribbon of the road. All of it was sailing by at 70 mph and I was looking at it through the windshield, but nonetheless, I started wondering if there was a way to make pictures of it.
My camera was at my feet, it always is when I’m on the road, so I picked it up and started looking. The first thing I saw was that the long end of the lens was going to be my workhorse so I racked it…
