ONE LAYER AWAY

LONG BEFORE MOST OF US EVER SCREWED A FILTER ONTO A LENS, we were shooting images that achieved kinda the same result. For as long as there have been windshields on cars (windscreens to you Brits), there have been through-the-windshield pictures, since, as we all know, photos are where you find them, when you can get them. Of course, we stipulate that some things that look amazing to your eye come out substantially less so when shot from inside a car, but that’s a lament for another day. Main point is, our first filtered images are often shot through a layer of smashed bug guts, dust, rain smears and wet leaves. And we have mostly been cool with that.

I have more than enough personal history to persuade me that windshield shots seldom truly deliver, and yet the twelve-year-old inside of me still believes that whatever I point a camera at, that’s what I’ll get (a fantasy seldom borne out by reality), and so I can still be convinced to take the shot anyway, especially in the digital age, in which, once you buy the equipment, you’re basically shooting for free. This temptation is made more urgent by the evanescent nature of auto travel itself, conditions in which waiting even a second too long means a vanished opportunity. But let’s face it, we’re truly up against it, on average. If the curvature of the glass doesn’t louse up your sharpness, or if the flare at one end of the glass doesn’t send a rainbow streak across the other, then you can still eighty-six the entire process through camera shake, or just trying to anticipate the precise moment to snap the shutter on subjects that are constantly in motion. It’s kind of a perfect storm of, well, storms. Despite it all, you do occasionally capture a keeper, hence the above illustration, which is less in the “personal best” category than it is in the “doesn’t totally suck” division. But hey.

And so we soldier on, lured by the sheer what-the-hell nature of shooting largely by instinct, in an arena in which we’re more or less expected to fail. Maybe it’s the last vestige of our amateur status, those days of carefree shooting before we even earned our brown belt. Or, just maybe, it’s an attempt to inject both uncertainty and fun into a pursuit that we typically approach, sadly, as a job rather than a joy.