Title • wheels in the rain

I drive to work on the M62 over the Pennines, the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire, and it’s mostly an uneventful journey. And despite the fact that I’m hurtling along at 70mph+, in often atrocious weather, surrounded by drivers that seem mostly oblivious to their surroundings, skimming over the surface of the earth on a few square inches of rubber, I very rarely worry about what might happen, or what might go wrong – it just never occurs to me.

But when I do think about it, it strikes me as quite bizarre that we would voluntarily put ourselves in such circumstances on a daily basis, and as I drive past the almost daily crashes (I exaggerate slightly) – overturned vehicles, jacknifed lorries, and various other assorted mishaps, I do momentarily realise that driving isn’t really the same as floating along in an indestructible armchair.

So today’s effort is an attempt to capture something of the less comfortable side of driving – something of the drama and power of the experience. Technically this image was a bit of a problem in that the original was extremely flat – road spray isn’t exactly a high contrast subject – so I used three duplicate layers, all set to ‘overlay blend mode’, with a final Curves adjustment to bump up the contrast. The foreground was also desaturated. A consequence of using multiple overlay layers is a dramatic increase in saturation: lin this instance this left the foreground an odd shade of blue (probably because blue light scatters more readily than other frequencies).