When the Car Becomes a Camera

PHOTOSNACK #752

Here is my Sunday thought.

I recently realized how often I photograph from the car.

Not because it’s convenient, but because it quietly removes my need to over-decide. I’m still looking. Still anticipating. Still previsualizing. As I approach certain places, parts of the landscape begin to speak to me in advance—lines of trees, a break in light, a structure half-hidden behind branches. I sense the photograph before it arrives.

The difference is that the car sets the conditions. Speed replaces fine control. The window becomes a boundary I don’t cross. Trees stretch, buildings dissolve, details refuse to settle. What remains is tone and rhythm rather than description. In that way, these images feel closer to how memory works than how photography is usually taught.

There’s a quiet trust involved. I can’t stop, can’t step closer, can’t refine the frame. I allow the moment to pass through me as much as I pass through it. The photograph happens in motion, or it doesn’t happen at all.

When I return to images like this later, they don’t tell me exactly where I was. They remind me how it felt to be approaching something—attentive, alert, already in conversation with the world before the shutter ever clicked.

Until next time,
Tomasz