Recently while on a trip to Long Island, NY I found myself in the back seat of an SUV as a passenger. That was strike one against me since I obviously was not in control of the vehicle and couldn’t just stop and pull over whenever I felt the desire to grab a spur of the moment photograph. Strike two, crossing over a heavily traffic-ed George Washington Bridge from New Jersey to New York City is not a highly recommended time to stop and plant a tripod and camera in the middle lane with oncoming traffic. You COULD do it, but I’m of the opinion that the resulting mess would not be worth it. Not wanting to incur strike three I took a chance and set my camera to a fairly short focal length (57mm), a relatively wide aperture (f/5.0), and bumped up my ISO to a happy medium between sensor sensitivity and possible unwanted noise. This gave me a resulting shutter speed of 1/4000th sec. which would be more than adequate to freeze any moment of the SUV I was riding in and the traffic on the bridge. With the added benefit of a very good IS system on my lens I simply reached my arm forward into the driving cabin of the vehicle, aimed blindly, wished for the best and fired off a couple of frames. I knew the resulting shot would need some cropping and horizon alignment, but that was a small price to pay for getting SOMETHING decent to work with.

Much to my delight the results were worth the little bit of motivation and effort it took to at least TRY to get something worth keeping. So the next time you’re passing by something and you’re presented with less than ideal conditions instead of focusing on (no pun intended) what you can’t do, focus on what you do and hope for the best. You might just get lucky!

Before and After Photos Below….

Dave

Before

After