Night in Arches National Park
Getting Light Trails
I’ve recently changed how I get light trails. It’s a minor change, but I’ve had more success with it. I used to take a series of bracketed photos when cars go by and just hope for the best. This actually worked quite a bit, but sometimes the very short and very long exposures in a bracket would be useless. The short one would be too dark and the long one would be too bright. Anyway, now I turn off the autobracketing and switch over to manual.
It honestly takes a lot of guesswork, but I usually get my f-stop quite low and my ISO around 100 or 200. I play with these so that my exposure is at least 5 seconds. Sometimes 5 seconds is all you need for a car going by. But if I want a lot of cars and need 20 or 30 seconds, I’ll keep moving the f-stop to a higher and higher number to balance. It’s actually kind of fun to guess and then experiment with different settings. You can simply press play after you shoot to see if you guessed right, then make the adjustments accordingly.
Daily Photo – Night in Arches National Park
Okay well here is yet another amazing place in Utah. Yes, I know all you people in Utah are saying, “Yes we know Utah is awesome, Trey — it’s about time you figured that out for yourself!” Well I have… and now I lament that I was only in Arches National Park for a day. But I tried to make the most of it, even squeezing all the light out of dark here after an amazing day of sightseeing.
