Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Shooting light trails

One of my preferred methods of photography is long exposures. Some may call me lazy but I get my desired results when I'm not in a hurry and have ample time to setup my tripod and camera gear. After setting up the camera on top of a pedestrian bridge I patiently wait till the time is right, ie, heavy traffic to take my shot.

Here are some of the things you need when doing long exposures.

A good stable tripod,
Some food and water (depending on how long you're gonna be there)

Things to note;
. close up the aperture from 11 to above to get a good sharp image
. turn off optical image stabilization, VR, SteadyShot or whatever its called on your camera
. try different shutter speeds with the same aperture settings to get longer or shorter streaks

Visit my Light Trails page for more pictures [link]

11 comments:

mario said...

Awesome work! I see your practicing those fancy light shots Ray talked about :)

Anonymous said...

cool stuff ! are we going to be seeing you on the credits of National Geographic shortly ?

Abid said...

Good pictures.

Mathai said...

mario: thanks man, yep practice makes perfect :)

purple: haha, I'm not good enough for that.. but thanks for the compliment. :)

Abid: thank you

Rayboy said...

Mathai: i love the last vertical one... it gives amazing curves... you should try to get the curve near the airport,.. people zoom out there at that curve. should be interesting.

Bu Yousef said...

Great shots Mathai - and good advice which I will follow.
Thanks.

Bu Yousef said...

My apologies for double posting...
I keep my VR on! Won't from now on...
What ISO is good for a shot like this?

Mathai said...

Rayboy: thats a nice place to take photos, I might try it soon.

Bu Yousef: Thanks Bu Yousef, if you're using the tripod the VR can be switched off. I set the ISO at 200 but I think you can go up till 800 without any noise.

Bu Yousef said...

Merci :)

eleventh.st said...

Thank you for this post! I've always wanted to give this a try, but never got around to it!

Btw your photography posts are great! Simple and to the point! Thanks!

Mathai said...

eleventh.st: I'm flattered ! thank you :)

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