Table of Contents

Interview with Paul Kessel

The Window Seat

Andreas Norstedt on Street Photography

Medellin’s Comuna 13

Homeless in the Land of Plenty

Street Shooters of January 2022

The Window Seat

Virginia Hines

When I travel by train or car I like to aim my camera out the window. The point of view is unusual and the motion produces unique visual effects. Lee Friedlander, Ishiuchi Miyako, Robert Frank, and Patrick Zachmann are just a few of the photography legends who have tried this technique; Friedlander’s America by Car consists entirely of photos made from inside autos (although his car is stationary in many of the shots). While this type of photography can be rewarding, it presents some challenges. Maybe you’ve tried it and didn’t get the results you were hoping for. The best photos come from anticipating problems and making choices about equipment and settings in advance to yield the desired outcome: “making” pictures vs. simply “taking” them. Here are some things to consider if you’re ready to give it a try:

Motion Blur

If you’re making photos in motion you should be comfortable with motion blur. Instead of trying to minimize it, I like to use it to enhance the picture. For example, when the camera itself is moving quickly, foreground objects blur more than those in the background. I can use this effect to draw attention to or away from certain elements in the picture.

In this photo made from a moving train in China, the rather blurry foreground contrasts with and helps emphasize the thicket of electricity pylons, farther from the lens. I shot this with a 50mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/125.

Lens & Settings

For this type of photography, a shutter speed of at least 1/125 works best and if available light permits, I may go up to 1/250, even 1/500, depending on how fast I’m traveling, how much blur I want, and how close the nearest objects are to the camera. Faster shutter speeds mean wider apertures, which limit depth of field. Shooting in motion works best on days where bright sunlight gives back a stop or two. It’s a challenge to focus when you’re moving rapidly, and interesting objects often pop quickly in and out of the frame at different distances, so I ideally shoot at f/8 or higher to have as much depth of field as possible. Consider raising ISO a bit to maximize the zone of focus.

Another way to get more depth of field is with a wider angle lens. In that case the tradeoff is between field of view and the size of objects in the distance. If you’re driving through the desert, the saguaro cacti that seem so impressive to your eyes might look tiny and trivial in a wide-angle photo. On the other hand, if you’re shooting urban streetscapes from a commuter train and the most interesting parts of the frame are within a few dozen meters of the lens, a wide perspective can enhance the photo with more context and detail. I use prime lenses and find that 35mm (full frame equivalent) is a good focal length for many shooting-in-motion situations. A zoom lens offers more options, but you have to be quick to respond to the fast-changing scene. A lens that’s too long – more than around 50mm – tends to have such a narrow field of view that the sense of horizontal motion across the frame is de-emphasized or eliminated entirely; the result is more like a stationary picture.

For this shot of Coney Island from the subway I used a 35mm lens, which produced lots of environmental details that add up to an overview of one of New York’s most iconic locations. The 1/125 shutter speed handled less light reaching my lens due to the subway car’s tinted glass. I wanted to be sure the billboard stayed sharp, so I shifted the focus zone forward. Background objects are not perfectly crisp, but still recognizable.

Finally, I zone focus. If your lens isn’t marked to make this easy, there are depth-of-field smartphone apps to do the calculations for you. Still, you have to make decisions about the zone’s parameters (minimum and maximum distances) and develop the knack of estimating distance at a glance. In most cases I want a maximum distance of infinity. For a 35mm lens set at f/11, this means a minimum distance a bit under two meters. At f/8, the closest in-focus objects are around 2.5 meters away if the maximum is infinity.

Unique Vantage Point

A big advantage of window seat photography is the opportunity to shoot from an unusual point of view: a vehicle right-of-way. This can range from an elevated overpass to the interior of your car. The unique perspective creates opportunities for interesting compositions and unexpected juxtapositions. Shooting from a vehicle expands the options for seeing and capturing a scene, going beyond the convention of capturing shots at eye level from the sidelines. The more I shoot this way the quicker my eye is to latch onto fresh ways to position and arrange my frame.

In this street scene, the view from an Amtrak overpass on the Northeast Corridor offered an opportunity to emphasize diagonal lines in a way that wouldn’t exist at eye level. 35mm lens, shutter speed 1/125.
It would have been risky to say the least to try this shot of a rain storm in Farmington, New Mexico, without the safety of shooting from the car. I included a bit of the dashboard to give the photo even more of an immediate, “you are there” feeling, heightening the sense of preserving an evanescent, slightly ominous moment in time. 35mm lens, shutter speed 1/125.

Telling a Story

Combining an elevated point of view, wide-angle perspective, and unorthodox vantage point can yield images that capture a lot of details and information. If you arrange these right in the frame, the photo can tell a complex story that would require the proverbial “thousand words” and then some to relate verbally. In projects on both China and the Northeast Corridor I’ve found that in-motion photography is a great tool for visual storytelling.

Weinan, China, shot from a train window. The unique perspective of the railway tells a different story about Weinan than you might read in a tourist brochure: a dry river bed and abrupt end to modernization efforts at the edge of town cast the hopeful prosperity visible in the background in a different light. 50mm lens, shutter speed 1/125.
Missing buildings, patched streets, and a U-Haul van tell a tale of urban decay along the Northeast Corridor. The old industrial chimney on the horizon completes the picture of a once-vibrant blue-collar neighborhood left behind by the modern global economy. 35mm lens, shutter speed 1/125.

For the same reason, this technique is a good way to capture a singular sense of place, creating a fresh take on well-known locations. Some examples:

The Lower Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn Bridge shot from the subway crossing the East River via the Manhattan Bridge. Here the motion blur not only sets off the sharper background, it also helps suggest the energy of the city itself. 35mm lens, shutter speed 1/125.
Slight motion blur in the foreground plus subtle tonal changes from the car window’s greenish glass heighten the otherworldly quality of this landscape view of the Nevada Great Basin. This was a situation where, with nothing of interest in the foreground and a wider lens, I set a faster shutter speed at the expense of great depth of field. 28mm lens, shutter speed 1/500.