Drive-by Photography

I recently discovered a whole new genre of photography on Flickr and got inspired to try my hand at it. Its called “Drive-by Photography” and is generally done from a vehicle or from near one that has pulled over to allow access to a photographic subject.

Usually shot “on the fly” with a point & shoot camera or phone camera, these photos give a whole new insight into a world that is totally divorced from more formal types of photography. If photography is the art of capturing unique and fleeting moments of life this is truly the Zen of Photography in its finest form.

The image above was captured with a Nikon Coolpix P-300 while driving to work on a soggy Louisiana morning. This is an image that we have all experienced at one time or another but one that rarely finds its way into our photo collections. 

Redscale Rides Again!

I confess that my last (first) experience with redscale film (see September 27^th 2014 blog post) was a little underwhelming. I suspect that it was partially my fault. I was trying for the deep dark red look and I did succeed in that respect but I really didn’t know what to expect and I think I ended up under exposing the images too much by just shooting at “box speed.”

Box speed in that case was ISO 400 for the Rollei Redscale film which I suspect is simply Rollei 800 ISO color film (Nightbird) reversed or loaded into the film canister backwards. I had been told that this (redscale) process usually requires “at least” a one stop adjustment and that’s likely all the 400 ISO provided. The next time I use this film I will try to expose it at 200 ISO or maybe even 100 ISO which would be a two or three stop adjustment and I should see better results.

“Live and learn,” as they say. This time as you can see above the images came out better.  I was shooting a roll of 110 Lomography “Lobster” redscale film shot with a Rollei A110 camera. I shot at box speed (200 ISO) again this time since with this camera and film format there really was no choice, but as you can see it worked out much better this time with the “Lobster.”

I should also note that I have never been really happy with the 110 format because of the excessive graininess and lack of sharpness and these images have that as well but this little Rollei seems to somehow consistently produce some pretty amazing images in spite of the grain and associated lack of sharpness. In this case you might even argue that it is those very features that make the image unique and memorable.