Almost every day as I'm going about my day I see settings and situations that appeal to me, and I'd love to stop and take a photo. Often it's just a shared expression between strangers or a chance alignment of unrelated objects, and since I'm usually in my car at the time, it goes unrecorded.

But occasionally I'll see something that I really want to capture, and I'm not in a hurry so I could easily stop to take it, but it's in an area I don't trust. Partly I'm concerned for my wellbeing of course, but it's mostly the expense of my equipment that tends to make me wary of wandering around in such places, which means that I end up missing lots of shots I'd have loved to get.

One solution I've found is to use the Holga, which makes me feel like a much less tempting target, but the Holga is only well-suited to certain types of images. Sometimes I'll see something that I'd really need the DSLR to capture the way I want, but, since I'm scared of stopping, I convince myself it's not worth it and keep driving.

As a sort of therapy for this (arguably healthy) fear, I sometimes force myself to pull over, get out of the car, and wander around the area until I get used to it and am no longer scared of being there. After exploring for a while and getting comfortable with an area, I feel less like a foreigner there — it has become "my" seedy alley, and I don't feel self-conscious about being there.

One such scene greets me most mornings on my drive home from work, and every morning I go through the same debate. Today I kept hesitating until I was past it, as I usually do, but this time I turned around and drove back. I parked under a sketchy overpass, got out my camera, locked up the car, and set off wandering about.

I ended up deciding that I couldn't safely reach the point necessary to take the picture I wanted — not because of mugging danger, but because I'd have to walk half a mile down an expressway with no emergency lane and with regular traffic driving past. I'll have to try again from a different vantage point some other time.

I did take some other photos while exploring, and I'm happy with many of those. I was surprised to find this placid scene amongst all the industrial waste.

As I was walking back to the car, a homeless guy passed me on an old bicycle. I really wanted to take his picture but I still haven't gotten up the nerve to photograph strangers. Ah, well, I've still got challenges to overcome.