Migrant workers on lunch break.
You probably aren’t going to believe me when I tell you that this image was taken while I was driving – on Harbor Blvd down in Ventura. I have this bad habit of photographing while I am driving – and no, I don’t look through the viewfinder while I am doing it!
This is true point-and-shoot at it’s finest. After at least a 1000 messed up images, however, I now have a few presets for the camera prior to shooting in this manner. First, the lens is set to wide open, usually f/2.8 to get the most light I can to stop the motion of my driving past the subject – blur only goes so far!; and second, I take the camera off auto focus and preset the focus at infinity – to many focuses on the window or bug splats only goes so far! I am also at a higher ISO so the exposure is faster and the moving action is stopped.
This image has had a bit of post production manipulation done to it in Photoshop, such as the artistic effect of the watercolor filter, selective increase of saturation, and Gaussian blur on the background mountains – some of it to compensate or adjust for shooting through my tinted windows, some of it just to play with effects. Not sure I like the ‘halo’ effect around the trees, though – but since these images are not for clients, I only allocate so much time to play/manipulate them or take them through any type of editing routine.
TODAY’S IMAGE

lunch break
camera type: Canon EOS 5D
lens type: Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM, 110mm
exposure: 1/1250s @ f/8.0
ISO: ISO 400
post-production: Lightroom 2.0 and Photoshop CS3
location: Venturs, CA – Harbor Blvd in Ventura, CA