3,000 Miles of Film: What One Cross-Country Trip Taught About Shooting on the Road

A highway fire less than an hour outside Los Angeles is the kind of thing that stops most trips before they start. Here it became the first frame of a 3,000-mile drive across the country, and the moment sets the tone for everything that follows.

The drive from Los Angeles to New Jersey gets documented by Willem Verbeeck, who packed three film cameras and pointed the car east for a month on the East Coast. He carried the Canon EOS-1N as his main body, a Leica for casual days, and the Mamiya 7 for medium format, and he admits carrying that many is more than he actually wants to lug around. The route ran through Tucson, then White Sands, then Texas, with the film stocks and the weather dictating most of the decisions along the way. Verbeeck loads Ektacolor 400 and shoots it hard in bright conditions, which is where the practical advice starts to land.

White Sands is the technical heart of the trip. Shooting there in over 100-degree heat, Verbeeck sets his exposure two stops over to keep the meter from being fooled by all that white gypsum, the same problem you hit shooting snow. A reflective meter reads a bright, uniform field and tries to render it gray, so it underexposes badly unless you push it back the other way. He spends hours trying to catch lightning handheld as a storm rolls through, burns through two or three rolls, and figures he may not have landed a single frame because the strikes were too fast. That honesty about the miss is worth more than a clean highlight reel, since it shows how much film gets spent chasing a shot that may never arrive.

The metering lesson carries past White Sands and into anything with extreme, uniform brightness. Beaches, fog, a white wall behind a portrait subject, a bride's dress against snow all trick a meter the same way, and the fix is consistent: read the scene, then deliberately overexpose to protect the tones you actually care about. Negative film gives you room to do this because it holds highlights far better than shadows, so erring bright is the safer bet with color negative stock. Digital shooters work the problem in reverse, guarding the highlights and lifting shadows later, which is why the habit of reading light instead of trusting the meter matters whichever format you shoot. Build the instinct once and it transfers everywhere.

Not every frame comes from a plan. Verbeeck gets full media credentials at a Texas speedway on a last-minute phone call, something he says is nearly impossible to pull off in California, and shoots the pits from the bleachers for one of his favorite images of the trip. He stumbles into a World Cup match between the Netherlands and Japan in Dallas, skips the ticket entirely, and photographs fans streaming out of the stadium, drawn to the clash between the Japanese supporters in white, red, and blue and the wall of Dutch orange. A flat tire in Lovington, New Mexico gets fixed for free at a local shop, and a stop in Virginia turns into a portrait session inside a friend's automotive garage.

Watch the video above to see how the White Sands rolls turned out and whether any of that handheld lightning actually made it onto film.