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How to shoot light trails
Techniques
24 October 2007 09:25
Shooting trails of light from a moving car is a really easy technique to try, although there are a few tricks to get good results. For safety, get someone else to drive the car so you can concentrate on taking pictures from the back seat.
1. Clean your windscreen thoroughly, inside and out. There will be a lot of light bouncing about and even an apparently spotless windscreen can look smeared when you look at your photos afterwards.
2. Decide how to frame your shot. It’s a good idea to crop the picture to a panoramic format so you can fit the entire windscreen in the viewfinder, shooting from the backseat with a 17mm wide-angle on the camera, knowing you can crop slightly from the top and the bottom. Or, fix the camera to the far left of the front passenger seat but this will vary according to the image you have in mind.
3. You’ll need a tripod that’s adaptable enough to be fixed securely inside the car. A little ingenuity may be called for, but don’t set off until you’re sure your tripod won’t slip over and break your lens. With the tripod in place, fix the camera to it, checking composition in the viewfinder, focusing and setting the aperture in advance. Focus on the windscreen, use aperture-priority and set f/11 for plenty of depth-of-field.
4. It’s useful to sit in the back or have a back-seat passenger fire the shutter via a cable release so there’s no chance of the camera being knocked out of position. In aperture-priority the camera makes the decisions on the exposure time to match the selected aperture and ISO (best set at ISO 100) to minimise noise and gain long exposures. In most roadside conditions, with a good combination of light sources, f/11 gives an exposure of between 20 and 30 seconds.
5. Think about where you’re going to drive in order to record lots of light trails in your images. Remember, the dashboard and car interior need to be pin-sharp as a reference point for the abstract colourful trails outside. It helps if you can get light sources at different levels in your images – so street lighting and traffic lights are useful. You also need to take a lot of images, as it’s a hit-or-miss technique but its unpredictability is a large part of the fun. Motorways are often the best locations to try it out.