Open Road · August 12, 2026 · 5 min read
A week on the open road with one camera
Fifteen hundred miles of desert highway, one body, two lenses. What I packed, what I skipped, and why the detours made the trip.
A road trip rewards restraint. Every extra piece of gear is one more thing to dig past at the moment the light is doing something interesting, so this trip went out with one body, a wide lens and a short telephoto.
The detours are the trip
The frames I still like are almost never from the place I drove out to see. They come from the frontage road I turned down because the clouds looked better over there, or the gravel pull off where the fence line ran straight to the horizon.
Leave two hours of slack in every driving day. That slack is where the photographs live.
Shooting through the middle of the day
Hard midday light is usually written off, but in the desert it gives you clean geometry, deep shadow and real separation between the road and the rock. I stop chasing landscapes at noon and start looking for shapes instead.
Files got backed up to two drives every night in the motel room. It is a boring habit that has saved an entire trip more than once.