Hi friends,

I'm writing this from somewhere in Kyrgyzstan, only a few days into the trip and currently on a long drive out of Bishkek into the mountains. Packed into a 4Runner with my friends @meshna and @thechrishau, who you may already know and follow as well.

Before leaving home, I made a couple new posts in partnership with Adobe about Premiere Mobile - be sure to check them out below!

The first few days of Kyrgyzstan have been a slower introduction to the country than I expected (in a good way honestly). Small villages with yellow houses and tractors parked at odd angles. Yurt camps where the hosts wave you in before they even know your name.

Lately I’ve been noticing how often I’m in a car (or jeep like in Kenya) and still need to get shots while we’re driving. It can be really tough, so I thought it would be a fun tip to cover this week.

Vehicle shooting is its own discipline, and it shows up on basically every road trip, safari, and overland trip you'll ever do. Most photographers either ignore it or treat it like a snapshot exercise. It can be much more than that.

A few things that have made a difference for me:

Match your shutter speed to your focal length, then push it higher. Inside a moving vehicle on a rough road, every camera-shake variable is multiplied. The starting point is the reciprocal rule for handheld: your shutter speed should at minimum match the focal length you're shooting at. At 50mm, that's 1/50 just for static handheld. From a moving vehicle, double or triple it. At 200mm I want at least 1/1000. At 400mm or 800mm on a long telephoto, you're looking at 1/2000 or faster. Auto-ISO makes this manageable; lock the shutter where you need it and let the camera raise the ISO to compensate. The shorter the lens, the more forgiving. The longer the lens, the more aggressive you have to be.

Don't brace against the vehicle. Your instinct is to lean the camera or your elbow against the door or the frame to stabilize. Don't. The vehicle is the source of the vibration. Float the camera in your hands, let your body absorb the bumps, and keep your contact points with the vehicle to a minimum.

Shoot through clean glass or no glass. Side windows reflect, distort, and gather dust at exactly the angle you want to shoot through. If you can roll a window down, do it. If you can't, get the lens hood as close to the glass as possible to kill reflections, and shoot wider than you think.

Anticipate where the road is going. This is the wildlife photography skill applied to landscapes. If you can see a corner coming, a ridge line, a village ahead, get the camera up before you arrive. The shot that requires you to lift the camera as you see it is already gone.

Embrace what the motion does. Pan-blurred foregrounds, slight smears of color across the window, a person walking past as you drive by. These can look like mistakes or they can look intentional. The difference is whether you commit to the shutter speed that makes the effect work.

Some of the most honest travel photographs in any portfolio are taken from a moving window. It's worth treating that as a real shooting situation, not a throwaway one.

Apple unveiled major Photos app AI tools at WWDC 2026. A new spatial Reframe feature lets you adjust the perspective of a photo after capture, as if you'd moved the camera in the original scene, and a new Extend tool expands the frame's aspect ratio with generated content.

Peak Design's new Travel Line bags hit retail. After 7,100+ Kickstarter backers and $2.4 million pledged, the new 20L Travel Backpack, 2-in-1 40L Travel Backpack, Travel Weekender messenger, and Travel Crossbody sling are now available direct.

The 2026 Beaker Street Science Photography Prize unveiled 26 finalists. Conservation work, endangered species, and a Tasmanian aurora image are among the standouts. Worth a scroll if you like photography that doubles as field research.

Skylum's Luminar Summer Sale runs through June 28. Up to 70% off Luminar Neo if editing software is on your list.

Beth Moon is an American photographer who has spent more than twenty-five years photographing the oldest trees on the planet, mostly on large-format film, mostly in places that take days of travel to reach. Baobabs in Madagascar. Yews in the United Kingdom. Bristlecone pines in California. Dragon's blood trees in Socotra.

What I find compelling about her practice is how slow it is. A single tree might take her three trips, multiple years, and a hundred sheets of film to get the photograph she actually wants. Her book Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (Abbeville, 2014) is the work most people know her for, and her follow-up Diamond Nights photographs the same trees under starlight using exposures that run thirty minutes or longer.

She works in black and white almost exclusively, and her tonality is the kind that you only get from years of darkroom work translated into a digital workflow. A good follow if you want a reminder that the photograph doesn't have to be in a hurry.

That's it from the field this week. I'll be back home in a few days, and the full Kyrgyzstan debrief, with photos that I haven't even looked at yet, is going to take another week or two to come together properly.

This week's question: What's the most memorable photograph you've ever taken, and what happened to make it so memorable? I'd love to hear about it, so reply and let me know!

See you next week,
Paige

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P.S. Curious how I edit my photos? These are the exact presets I use for almost every travel & landscape shoot (designed for both mobile and desktop).

P.P.S. Some of my most popular travel and landscape shots are available as prints through Big Wall Decor. If you've ever wanted one on your wall, check them out here.