Long Exposure – Light Trails
You may have seen the fantastically bright and neon shots taken at night that show bright light trails and ghosted night time scenes. Your local motorway bridge or main road junction may be just the place for you to learn more about slow shutter speeds
The main principal behind this type of photography is understanding the effect of the shutter speed and the way it helps to blur or freeze motion. You don’t want ‘blurred’ shots as these are not usually pleasing to the eye – but what you do want is for the lights you see at night to be ‘burnt’ into the sensor leaving you with a fantastic array of colours and lights.
Here are a few of TipTop’s Top Tips on how to start taking some of these images yourself.
Location:
You first need to find yourself a place where there are a lot of architectural or traffic based lights and ideally where these are moving and making an interesting pattern. As mentioned above a motorway or main road bridge, a roundabout or a busy traffic light junction are great places to start.
Keep the camera steady:
Because we want to keep the stationary part of the photograph nice and sharp and as we are using a shutter speed a lot slower than the focal length of your lense you will need something to keep your camera steady during the exposure. This is where a tripod comes in. If you do not own one of these then make sure that there is a flat stable surface for you to rest your camera on.
With this in mind you may be better to use a remote or cable release so that you are not ‘shaking’ the camera as you press the shutter button. If you do not own one of these you can set your camera to 2sec or 10sec self timer which allows you to move away from the camera and it to settle down before it fires
Focusing in the Dark
It is not always easy to get your camera to autofocus in the dark (this is down to a lack of contrast the scene rather than a lack of light) with this in mind if you choose to shoot at a higher aperture number f11 etc. you will have more of the scene in focus and your focus point becomes less critical. (those of you with some camera knowledge will know that by increasing the aperture number you are decreasing the amount of light – but in this instance we can take the shutter speed as slow as we need to compensate)
The Speed of your shutter
When calculating shutter speeds that you need to capture the correct amount of light you need to consider the speed at which your subject is moving (if at all). For traffic moving at 30mph I find that 10secs + is sufficient to achieve the image below. You can now manipulate your settings so that you balance aperture/shutter speed/ISO to get the correct exposure and the correct amount of blur
Get creative
Remember that the movement of the light is being captured on the sensor while the stationary items are appearing as a normal exposure would. You can use torches, sparklers or even your phone to write messages or create shapes. Also try zooming in as the shutter is open.
Light painting is another name for the use of torches or speedlights that are used to add light exactly where you want it during a long exposure – try painting areas of the scene by using your torch as an imaginary paintbrush – the more you move over the same spot the brighter that part of the picture will become.
Anything that is ‘dark’ and moving will usually move quickly enough to not reflect enough light onto the sensor to show on the final image
Here are a few examples of light trails and the fun you can have:
If you are interested in finding out more about your camera and starting to create some fantastic effects – contact us @ http://www.tiptop-photography.com or call 0121 448 3732
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