Roadside Photography Might Be the Laziest Way to Take Good Photos

Plenty of the scenes worth photographing on any given day slide past your car window at highway speed, and you get a couple of seconds to decide whether to pull over. Most people decide not to, and that small decision repeated over years adds up to a lot of missing frames.

Talking yourself out of stopping is easy, so Rick Bebbington set himself a project built around doing the opposite. Over two days near his home in England, he photographs only what he can see from the road. A path that starts at the roadside and leads to a boat he can't see from the car doesn't count, though he'll still shoot it for himself. He works with a Fujifilm X-E5 and a Fujifilm X-H2S, a Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 DC DN Contemporary, a small 35mm f/1.4, and a little manual-focus lens.

His first real attempt is a yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked under a tree turning orange, and it goes wrong right away. A modern car sits so close that every frame includes the front of it, and moving in tighter breaks the link between the car and the foliage above it. He leaves it and keeps driving. At a canal, the light is flat and most of his frames don't work until a man walking a small dog wanders onto the towpath and gives the scene a bit of mystery. Later, an abandoned house with red creeper on its walls sits so close to the road that the subject has no room to breathe, and a wider lens wouldn't fix it.

Marking spots on a map turns a one-off drive into something you can return to. Bebbington does this with a spot he'd driven past before and pinned, and this time the sun sits on the wrong side and the trees haven't fully turned, so he plans to come back in about a week, ideally late in the afternoon when a fire might put smoke in the chimney. Both problems are ones you can plan around. Apps such as PhotoPills and The Photographer's Ephemeris show where the sun rises and sets on any date from any spot, so a pin dropped on a gray Tuesday can tell you which afternoon will put the sun where you want it. Autumn color also shifts from week to week, and trees at different elevations often turn at different times, so the same stretch of road can look quite different over a few weekends. A saved list in Google Maps or a simple notes file on your phone, filled in each time you drive somewhere routine, slowly becomes a scouting record of your own area that no travel guide has.

The low-pressure approach is what holds the project together. Bebbington goes out with no shot in mind and says he used to plan specific images, then come home disappointed when they didn't happen. With no target, everything he points his camera at is a bonus, and he finds himself happier with what he brings back. After a slow stretch on a main road with few places to stop, he turns down a random side road on the theory that smaller villages and lanes hide more. A farm roller and a spreader, with a hill behind them, nearly form a neat triangle until an overhanging tree gets in the way, and he won't cross the fence into the field to fix it. Safety comes up too: if something catches your eye, find the nearest safe place to pull over, even if that puts you a long way from what you wanted.

Some of the best moments come from turning around. He drives past a set of shipping containers, goes on about two miles, then doubles back, and the sun comes out as he arrives. His reasoning is simple: the worst case is that you get nothing and drive on, and at least then you know. Not every gamble pays off. A backlit view with horses lines up for about 20 seconds, but at full size, power lines he hadn't noticed behind the trees cut through the frame, and he isn't sure it's worth the retouching. The next morning, a traffic cone at an abandoned garage adds a spot of color under dark clouds.

One roadside frame shows a lane dropping downhill between trees whose tops overlap at the top of the image. Bebbington takes a few steps forward, and a gap opens between the trees while the one on the left comes free of the branch hanging over it, which balances the frame. Even then, he points out that the road leads the eye toward nothing in particular.

That second morning, before a storm rolls in, settles some unfinished business. The Beetle is still under its tree, and this time nothing is parked on either side of it. There's no light, but he prefers the frames with the car on its own, and he counts himself lucky it was still there, since a car like that is usually gone by the time you return. He also finds a red house set farther back from the road than the abandoned one from the day before, and the extra distance gives it the depth the first one lacked. He closes with a ratio for anyone who wants to grow: spend about 80% of your time building a portfolio of the work you normally make and the other 20% on experiments like this one. Paying attention to what's around you, he argues, matters more than any camera or edit.

If you want to see how much a few steps changed that downhill lane, Bebbington shows the frame before and after in the video.