[Photography] 5 Advanced Tips for Light Trail Photography

If you’ve never shot light trails before, start with Darren Rowse’s excellent article How to Shoot Light Trails. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, here are five advanced tips for creating your own unique light trail photography.

1. Go big or go home

You don’t want an image with tiny light trails. You want big, Texas-sized, light trails streaking across the photo. As with any subject, if you want the subject to appear large, get close to it. Exaggerate the effect by using a wide-angle lens. Another way to add a sense of size to a subject is to shoot it from below. Shooting a person from a low point of view makes the person appear larger and more powerful. The same is true with light trails.

Get as low as you can, and as close as you can safely, to the traffic. If you’re shooting along a busy street, place two of your tripod legs barely into the street so that they are resting against the curb. Lower your tripod as far as you can and point it up. By getting as low and close as I could in the Chicago Theatre image (above), the top trails of the bus appear taller than the theatre marquee.

2. Visualize and compose for the light trails

Look at any of the images in this article and picture them without the light trails. You’re left with a boring composition that doesn’t work. When photographing light trails, you need to visualize how the trails will look in the image and compose your image with them in mind.

Treat light trails as if they were a river meandering through your image. You wouldn’t compose the shot so that the river moved straight across your frame, so don’t do it with light trails either. Pay attention to where the trails enter and leave the frame. Your eye will be drawn to the spot in the frame where the cars are beginning as it will have some of the densest and brightest trails. Place this location as you would place a main subject using the rule of thirds. The trails should move across your image and end at either the corners of the frame, or a vanishing point. Place this vanishing point in the opposite third of the frame. If the light trails enter in the lower left, have them end in the upper right. This lends a sense of movement to your composition.

If you can get to the middle of the road with traffic on either side of you, consider going for a perfectly symmetrical shot. You’ll need an interesting subject to go along with the trails, so look for a bridge or interesting buildings on the side of the road. Wait to hit the shutter until you have traffic on both sides of you to create a balanced composition. More importantly, make sure that you’re in a safe position. Stand in the median, or off the street. Never set up in the middle of a busy street.

3. Isolate the light trails from the scene

To create an interesting abstract image of light trails, put yourself in a position where the lights from the cars are the only light source. An expressway overpass is an ideal location. You don’t want any buildings or other light sources in the frame. Find a location where the road takes an interesting path and underexpose the scene so that the only things that appear are the light trails and streetlights.

When you open the photo on your computer, increase the exposure of the light trails while keeping the black areas black. You can increase the exposure of just the trails by increasing the whites slider in Lightroom, lowering the white point, or making an adjustment to the tone curve in Lightroom or Photoshop. You’ll be left with an image that shows only the path of the trails that makes for a unique abstract image.

4

. You don’t need cars for light trails

You can create light trail images at night by shooting anything that is moving and emitting light. If you’re photographing a city like Chicago, you’ll mostly shoot cars and buses, but don’t forget about trains, bikes, horse-drawn carriages, or even a bunch of kids walking by swinging glow sticks. The rules for photographing any of these is the same as with cars, but you’ll be able to shoot them in locations that cars don’t drive, and the trails that they leave are different than your standard cars.

5. Make your own light trails

Who says that you need to stand around and wait for something to drive by? If you’re in a more remote location, set up your tripod, set up a long exposure, use the 10-second delay feature in your camera, jump in the car, and drive around in front of your camera. You can drive in any path that you think might be interesting. Experiment until you find something you like. You’re essentially light painting with your car lights. This technique works even better with a friend. One person drives while the other shoots! Find an empty parking lot or a winding road and make your own light trails.

What do you do to spice up your light trail shots? Have you tried any of these techniques? Tell us in the comments below.

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[Photography] Three Methods of Making Stunning Photographs in Bright Sunlight

Location Lighting Masterclass – The Art Of Shooting Into The Sun

Shooting directly into the sun may not be the first thing that pops into your mind when creating a photograph, but the effects it can have on your final image when done correctly can border on magical.

#2 The Dreamy Look

There are three primary looks that can be achieved by shooting into the sun.

1. The first of these takes advantage of lens flare and aims to over-expose the image drastically, creating a ‘dreamy’, almost glowing look. (see image above)


2. The second ignores the foreground entirely, exposing only for the brightly lit sky and creating foreground silhouettes.


3. The third comes somewhere in between, exposing for the brightly lit sky and simultaneously using reflection or fill flash to overpower the foreground shadows.

#2 The Silhouette Look

#3 The Balanced Look

Let’s work through each of these in turn, how to make stunning photographs in bright sunlight.

#1 – the Dreamy Look

This is not a photographic style I typically aim to produce, however it is nonetheless popular with many photographers. The style aims to expose for the skin tones predominantly, allowing the background to become significantly overexposed; and in the process, create a soft glow around the subject. This style can also take advantage of lens flare (the rings of light that appear in your shot when you shoot directly at bright sunlight) and the varying types of lens flare that different lenses create. To achieve this look, ensure that you have spot metering selected on your camera and measure directly for the skin (you will need to be in aperture priority mode for this). It doesn’t matter if the background overexposes; the primary aim is to expose for the skin and facial features. The brightness of the background will typically create a haze across the rest of the image.

#2 – the Silhouette Look

Again, using the camera’s spot meter in Aperture Priority mode, you will need to meter and expose for the background. Select an area (not directly on the sun itself) of sky near to the sun. You can lock the exposure using the AE lock function (usually the “*” button on Canon cameras) to enable recomposition of the image. Alternatively, note the shutter speed reading where you metered on the sky, switch to manual mode and set the camera up with the given shutter speed and aperture manually. Here, the aim is to darken everything in the foreground so be sure to think about the kind of silhouette you’re creating. Less is usually more. Too much in the foreground just creates clutter and loses the focal point.

#3 – the Balanced Look

The final, and arguably the most powerful is partway in between, and utilizes flash to fill the image exposure correctly.

Just like the silhouette style, you should meter on the background sky. If you don’t use flash, you’d end up with another silhouette. Instead, crank up the power of the flash as far as it will go (it takes a fair amount of flash power to overcome direct sunlight). About 600w (watt seconds) is preferable, and ensure that the subject you want to light up remains relatively close (due to the inverse square law, light fall-off will very quickly erode the power of the flash). Some post-production boost to the shadows and recovery of the background highlights may be necessary to properly balance the exposure.

A few general hints to help with direct sunlight shooting:

1) Autofocus often struggles in direct sun. Try first shading the end of your lens with your hand, focussing on your subject, then switching off autofocus and taking the shot without shading the lens.

2) Colors and white balance can often be thrown by bright sunlight. Be sure to shoot in RAW so that you can true up any color differentials later on.

3) Use a polarizer or ND (neutral density) filter where you can. Really bright direct sunlight and long exposures are not good for your camera’s sensor over time, just as they are not good to stare at with your naked eye.

4) Think about the time of day – you want light to fall behind your subject, not on top of it. Therefore, early mornings and late afternoons are best for this type of photography. It is also when the sunlight is weakest, resulting in less overexposure and less risk of damage to the sensor.

5) Think about alternative fill light sources. Consider reflective windows, white walls, metallic surfaces – effectively anything that can bounce the direct sun back into the subject to naturally add fill light. This means you will need to have your back to the reflective source.

6) Consider some post-production magic, if too much flare is coming into the shot. Mount the camera on a tripod so that the image doesn’t shift, then take two shots of the same scene with the same exposure settings. For one shot, leave the image as is, but for the second, shade the end of the lens with your hand. It doesn’t matter if your hand appears in the image because during post production, you simply join the half from the shaded shot that doesn’t have your hand in it, with the bright half from the unshaded shot. This technique will leave the full effect of the flare around the sun, but enable you to remove the surplus flare from the rest of the image.

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[Photography] 2 Night Photography Video Tutorials

David Kingham

This week’s collection of amazing images I shared a bunch of night photography, specifically those of the night starry sky, and hopefully you’re already thinking about how to shoot for this week’s photography challenge starry night photography.

So I went and found a couple of video tutorials to help you out on this mission.

First, this one by Adorama TV hosted by Mark Wallace. He walks through all the equipment he’s using, camera settings and it even includes a background serenade by some local coyotes.

In this second video host Jim Harmer shows you how to photograph the starry night sky and the Milky Way including a little tip about how to get foreground objects sharp in your final image.

I hope you enjoyed those. Please remember to hop over to the weekly challenge and show us your night photos there!

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[[Optical Component]] Display device

A display device includes an image display, an optical component, a light control component. The image display emits light including an image. The optical component has a focal distance D1. The light control component is provided between the image display and the optical component on an optical path of the light....



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[[Optical Component]] Magneto-optic switch

Systems, methods, and apparatus for optical switching. In some implementations, a magneto-optic switch includes multiple optical components positioned in order along a light path including: a single optical fiber collimator, a first pair of refraction crystals, a first half wave plate assembly, refraction components, a second half wave plate assembly, a...



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[[Optical Component]] Magneto-optic switch

Systems, methods, and apparatus for optical switching. In some implementations, a magneto-optic switch includes multiple optical components positioned in order along a light path including: a single fiber optical collimator, a first birefringent optic crystal, a first half wave plate assembly, a polarization rotation assembly, a second half wave plate assembly,...



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[[Optical Component]] Optical module and production method for same

An optical module includes a first plate-shaped member having a light transmissive optical component which is formed by applying etching to a silicon region, and a second plate-shaped member having light reflective optical components (mirrors) for reflecting light transmitting through the light transmissive optical component. The first and second plate-shaped members...



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