1 Hit the road

Capture the excitement and possibilities of a road trip

While the road trip tends to be more associated with novels like On the Road and iconic movies like Easy Rider, photographers have long been inspired by the open road’s visual possibilities and promise of adventure.

Robert Frank’s The Americans is the obvious example, but Edward Weston also travelled the USA, and Henri Cartier-Bresson recorded his trip through the south and west of the country in 1947.

This stunning image was taken by Jakub Polomski during a photographic trip to Patagonia. “It was taken as we were leaving El Chalten in the afternoon,” Jakub explains. “We were lucky with the weather, because it’s very unusual to get such a sunny day in Patagonia. For this image, I used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II SLR with a 17–40mm f/4 lens and a graduated neutral-density filter.”

While it may be hard to find an open road that stays empty for long in the UK, the classic image of tarmac snaking into an undiscovered distance remains alluring and compelling.

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* While you don’t need a totally empty road for this kind of image, it helps with impact, so be prepared to get up well before the traffic. * You can borrow many techniques from landscape photography – use a tripod (where it’s safe to do so) to keep shots sharp, and set a narrow aperture (higher f number) to maximise depth of field and front-to-back sharpness. * Jakub used a graduated ND filter to balance the sky with the middle and foreground, ensuring each section was well-exposed. If you don’t have a filter, the Graduated Filter tool in Lightroom can help to give dramatic skies with well-lit foregrounds – but use it sparingly. Fixing bad underexposure will also generate noise. * Try to avoid distractions and clutter by the side of the road, like litter bins, bus shelters and so on.