Urban Windshield Photography: Seeing Through a Different Lens

You know the old saying, "When it rains, it pours"? Then you probably also know how fitting that expression is for photographers. We can see long stretches between jobs but more often than not, when work is coming in, it comes in heavy. So sometimes it's hard to find the time to get your Sunday Fstoppers' post done. Which brings me to another old saying, "It pays to have friends". Especialy when that friend is fellow photographer Lukas Renlund who doesn't mind helping out with a post, where he shares his musings and inspirations from his latest photo project. Read what Lukas has to share and I'm sure, many of you, will relate.

Introducing Urban Windshield Photography. Say What!?



“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

There is something special about travelling and having the brief privilege
of seeing things with fresh eyes, and an open mind. We can only ever experience something for the first time, once. After seeing the same stuff over and over we gradually become more jaded and stop paying attention to the little things that are going on around us in our everyday lives. A change of scenery inspires me. Most recently I have moved my base to Cape Town after having taken my interactive art exhibition “Steal My Photograph!” on the road over the last half year.

For a first-timer in “the Mother City” one can only confirm the rumours about the picturesque cityscape to be true - they are indeed magnificent. Table Mountain, arguably one of the most well-known mountains in Africa, provides a hell of a backdrop to cosmopolitan Cape Town. One thing is sure, this landscape is quite the opposite of my usual home turf of Copenhagen (Denmark is as flat as a pancake).

Feeling out new surroundings

One of the best ways of settling into a new home-environment, is getting to know it (with my camera). This is best achieved by car or bicycle (a car makes it easier to take photos). So, I began documenting what I saw on my daily cruises through the city. After a few days of snapping away I noticed myself becoming generally more aware of the street life around me. More specifically a started paying more attention to people, whom without there wouldn’t be a ‘life’ in street life.

Downtown Cape Town is filled with people from all walks of life. Some seem to be on more of a mission than others (sidenote: women seem generally more active than men!). Others, just hang around the city centre and sit in the shade. However, even if somebody is just ‘hanging out’ I noticed they are usually still up to something, whatever that ‘something’ may be. After discovering this little insight a street turned into its very own little movie set and around each new corner was a potential Kodak moment lurking, just waiting to be exposed.

#UrbanWindshieldPhotography is born

Inspired by this quirky insight of the ‘movie set street’ I started making my photographs. I also began thinking of what it could mean to be an ‘Urban Windshield Photographer’. Here are some of my findings.

First, sitting in a car is much like sitting inside a camera. What I mean by this is that the car windows already provide you with a framed view of the outside world. It’s what they’re there for. Brilliant! Moreover, some of this visual field will naturally fall outside the frame. Does this sound familiar?

Second, from the comforts of a car you can point your camera at anything and often get away with it unnoticed. For some reason people outside
cars do not seem to take much of an interest in people inside them. The outside world is a more stimulating place to be I suppose. This makes for a next to perfect voyeuristic experience. Therefore I would suggest that a cars windshield could well be the most underrated ‘window to the world’.

Third, on a more technical note, I observed an interesting side-effect about the windshield itself. The glass, depending on it’s thickness and the angle in which it is tilted, will distort the colour spectrum ever so slightly. This gentle distortion actually gives my digital exposures a neat analogue look. I have enhanced this look slightly in Photoshop using film packs from VSCO http://vsco.co.

Shooting through glass sometime gives unexpected reflections. I am sure there are some photographers who would do anything to avoid a flare or reflection seeping into their carefully composed photograph. But in my opinion the reflections work well and add a layer of genuineness to my urban windshield photographs.

Be a square!

As the observant reader you are, you may have noticed that the photographs in this post are cropped to an old fashioned 6x6 format (the format happens to be one of my all time favourites). But more importantly it has the advantage to allow the 21st century Urban Windshield Photographer to re-crop his exposures. Let’s be honest here, when you’re in a car and the world is rushing past you at 30 mph, or more, you will have less time than Henri Cartier-Bresson ever had to compose your shot.

HOT TIP: I recommend shooting with a shutter speed no slower than 1/1000th of a second. Up your ISO if you need to. I would advise against any slower speeds that that, provided you are going for sharp exposures.

At the end of the day, this is what Urban Windshield Photography is for me; enjoyment from observing real, everyday life in the whirlwind of complete strangers - in an attempt to find my own place in the crosstown traffic.

Text and Photographs by Lukas Renlund Visit his website here, www.lukasrenlund.com