Road Trip Photography Tips From a Moving Car

The scenery on a road trip is some of the best photography you will ever have, and the problem is that it is flying past the window at speed, which defeats most of the usual rules. Photographing from a moving car is a different skill, and a few techniques turn the blurry, disappointing shots into images that capture the feeling of the drive itself.The first rule is shutter speed, because motion blur is the enemy, and a fast shutter, at least one five-hundredth of a second or faster, freezes the landscape as it rushes by. The second is focus, since a camera set to continuous focus will hunt uselessly, so the trick is to focus on the distance and let the depth of field carry the scene, and a phone can often do this automatically when you tap the horizon. The light matters too, with early morning and late afternoon giving the warm, dramatic light that flat midday cannot match.The composition is where the moving-car photo becomes art rather than a snapshot, because the window is a frame, and the best shots use the road as a leading line, the mirror as a frame, or the