Photography is not just the action of pressing a shutter button and capturing a moment. Photography is also an art that could be used to create abstract images.
In this experiment, we are creating light trails, I tried to capture the lights of moving cars.
I did this experiment on the corner of Saint Denis and Mont Royal in Montreal. It was a slow Sunday night, at about 11:00 pm. There wasn’t much traffic so I had to wait until cars were passing by.
The Camera settings for Long Exposure photography
The first thing to do was to put timer on the camera. The reason is that I don’t want the movement of my finger, when I press the shutter, to interfeer with the image. I put a timer of two seconds. The camera was to take the photo two seconds after I pressed the shutter.
ISO 100. This is the lowest my camera can go on ISO. I have never seen a camera that can go lower than 100, but I heard that there are cameras that can go as low as ISO 50.
F-Stop 22. This is the highest f-stop with the lens I was using. The f-stop is a camera setting that specifies the aperture of the lens on a particular photograph. It is represented using f-numbers. The letter “f” stands for focal length of the lens.
I was using a kit lens that came with my Canon Rebel T6i. 18mm to 55 mm.
The reason for having such a high f-stop is because I wanted the lease amount of light to enter the sensor. As you can see in the graph above, if the aperture is very small, there will be a small amount of light coming in. Having a wide aperture, for a long time period would give me a white wash out image.
Sutter speed 13 seconds. Usually, when a person takes a photo, the sutter speed varies from 1/60 second to 125/second, but for my experiment, I wanted the she aperture to be open for a longer amount of time, to be able to capture the light in movement. Alternative, leaving the apperture open for a longer amount of time is also called long exposure exposure photography.
Now it’s up to you. I challenge you to go outside, find a nice spot where cars are passing by and create some light trails.