Tag Archives: travel photography

The light was fad­ing fast when I spot­ted this smile-producing moun­tain cloud scene dri­ving in my car. When I got out of the car I was too low to get the scene at the right angle so I stood on the hood of the car to get the shot hand held. Shoot­ing while stand­ing on a car is some­thing I have been doing for a while. Time and time again I’ll be dri­ving and spot a gor­geous scene but when I get out of the car to make the image, I’m too low; my angle has changed. Stand­ing on the hood often gets me the higher angle that intrigued me in the first place. You need to be steady on your feet and stand away from the cen­ter of the hood. Any­way, it works for me but obvi­ously depend­ing on your body type and what type of hood you have, it may or may not work for you and you may or may not cause dam­age or ‘dings’ to your hood. In my case it seems to me that I can wipe off the foot prints after­wards with no other consequences.

I wanted to assure sharp­ness in this image with a fairly fast shut­ter speed because I wasn’t 100% steady bal­anc­ing on the car. The focal length was 170mm which required a shut­ter speed of at least 1/170 but due to not being so steady on a curved hood, I made SURE to go faster.  At ISO 400, in aper­ture pri­or­ity mode I chose an F-stop of F-14 (because I wanted good sharp­ness in the moun­tain and the clouds) and that gave me a shut­ter speed of 1/200.  Due to not being on flat ground though which com­pro­mised steadi­ness, I delib­er­ately danced with the ISO and made it 800. And the sec­ond I changed the ISO to 800, the cam­era changed the shut­ter speed to 1/400.  I liked that speed and aper­ture com­bi­na­tion and so I clicked the shut­ter release but­ton and made this image.

Cloudy Moun­tain Day Yukon, Canada