Taking Pictures Within a Car

During the Photo-Tour I encountered nice places and scenes that I wanted to photograph but could not get out of the car because the road and traffic did not allowed me to stop the car. Also, sometimes, pictures taken from a car can be more creative, more interesting than a normal snapshot of the landscape. Here is what I mean:
1. TIP: By shooting from inside the car, frame your picture with the car elements: mirror, or, the lateral window. However, don’t focus on these element: they represent just the frame, not the point of interest. The point of interest is the environment outside the car.

2. TIP: The picture from inside the car is interesting when motion blur is present. Not hard to do that: there are two key factors that you should know when hunting for the right moment to get the most spectacular blur:
FIRST: near objects get more of the motion blur

SECOND: the greater the speed, the stronger the motion blur

3. TIP: Considering the speed of the car, and the fact that inside the car there is less light than outside, you should set your camera on shutter speed priority – fast shutter speed. The kind of motion blur you want is not the one caused by your camera shake (which is an up-down movement), but the one caused by the moving car (which is horizontal).

4. TIP: Some animals tend to approach the car. Prepare something to eat and ask someone inside the car to hand it over the window, then catch with your camera the moment when the animal sticks the head into the car. Funny, isn’t it?


5. TIP: If the car is stopped but there is no need to get off in order to shoot something you like, then maybe you should not think about framing the picture with car elements: just open the window and take a normal shot. Without the motion-blur or middle of the road situations, it does not make much sens to fill the picture with unnecessary elements. However, the next pictures are some exceptions.

6. TIP: Watch out for the reflection and dust! The reflection of your body or other elements in the care window, and the dust on the window, can be avoided if you just open the window. Depending on the Sun’s position, you may not get any reflections thou the glass. Here’s an example of the situation when you can not open the front window of the car, so the is some dust…

Also, there are some situations when the reflection in the car’s lateral mirror can be interesting.

By Laura

I started photography as a hobby in 2005, during college. My passion slowly became a more important part of my life since 2008. Because of using a combination of my photographic knowledge, with those of internet marketing, I like to call myself a "photomarketer".

2 comments

  1. Hi, Im from Turkey and a Bussiness administration student from yeditepe university. I was planning to make a gallery with full of pictures that taken from inside the car. Because when you drive your car you see lots of beautiful or ordinary things that you can’t recognize and I want to show these pictures to the people. But there is a little problem it is really hard to take pictures in the traffic 🙂 whatever, I just wanna thanks to you for these tips and need your advise for this gallery that what do you think about this idea :))

  2. Whats up very nice web site!! Man .. Beautiful .. Superb .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…I am happy to seek out a lot of useful information right here within the submit, we need develop more techniques on this regard, thanks for sharing.

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