Long exposure shots of traffic

I always had this fascination of taking a picture of moving traffic with a long exposure(So that the tail lamps of cars appear as continuous streak of red light) in the dusk. I had no idea how it was taken and used to think that this might be some 'magic camera trick'. But obviously its not a magic trick.
All you would need to take such a long exposed shot of traffic are
1. A camera where you can set really long shutter speed.
2. A stable surface to keep the camera(preferably a tripod)
3. Optionally(also preferably) a remote control for your camera.

Chose a good spot and set up your camera. set your shutter speed to say 10 seconds. take a picture. Dont go too high on the ISO(over 400), for issues with noise. Also try to reduce your aperture(means increasing the f/number) so that you would not get over exposed images. Also in theory, making the aperture smaller(Increasing the f/number) would increase the depth of field and hence get a sharper image of the vehicle tail lamp streak.

You are all set, just go ahead and start clicking. Change your shutter speed based on the natural/artificial light available.

The picture you see was taking in Denver at a traffic light. I love the quality in this pic simply because it was not shot using my SLR but with my canon powershot A710 IS and still pretty good.
I would be uploading one similar pic with my SLR and lets see how muc of a difference would the pic be!

Picture details:
Camera: canon powershot A710 IS
ISO: I am actually not sure, it does not show up in the pic now!
Shutter speed: 8.0 sec
Aperture: f/8.0

thanks for reading!

Paintings

http://www.fritzart.com/index.php

check out the paintings of Harley Davidson n other cars...

Smokey

Sometimes you have to do things when you are in the mood.

For some reason I took out my camera and started taking some snaps of cars whooshing past on the road and trying to get a snap with trailing red and yellow lines. But then, that wasn't too exciting. That's when I remembered that there was once this discussion on trying to photograph smoke and how tricky it could be. I wanted to give it a shot now that I had a little more command on how each component of a camera contributed to a snap. For sure, I needed some source of smoke. Thanks to my roommate's parents who came here a few weeks back, there were some incense sticks lying around. I had read about having external lighting for smoke photography. For that I pulled out this small laptop table that was lying around the house and it had an LED lit lamp. I thought that was exactly what I needed and then started wandering around in search of a dark place. Now the only way I could find that was in the bathroom. I had never imagined that I would have a bed top study/laptop table an incense stick and my big fat camera all visiting the bathroom at the same time, but there I was, in the dark attempting something I had never tried before. I know for a fact that if I had waited for everyone to go to bed to get the room for myself I would have lost interest and never taken this up.

I don't really know how long that stick was burning for, but in that time I managed to take about a hundred and fifty snaps each with different setting and angles and what not. It was good fun doing that. Waiting for patterns to form and seeing how different light and camera angles gave different effects to the snaps and also the fact that I was stuck in the bathroom with my camera :D.

So then, things I learnt.

Actually, I didn't get good snaps that day. They were either grainy or blur or just plain black. I knew I was doing something wrong, I always thought that smoke needed little light and all that, but I was wrong. You need a good amount of light to capture smoke. But that doesn't mean you try to work with an over head light bulb or so. It needs to be bright and directed.

I did some reading up on smoke photography the next day and found a good article on it. Here is the link to that article...

http://www.beyondmegapixels.com/2009/07/smoke-photography-101-without-an-off-camera-flash-that-is-part-1/

Scott Kelby

http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/

Checkout this blog.
This guy has some really good contacts.
Every Wednesday, he gets a guest blogger to write something for him. (http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/category/guest-blogger)

Hez even supposed to be some photoshop/Lightroom guru.

He has a lot of books published.
If you want only the technique behind something and not all the technical details, then checkout his books.

The steam engine

This was the most unexpected and the only most exciting thing that I found to take snaps of during our visit to Arkansas to enjoy the beauty of fall. We were late by a week or two so we didn't get much of the fall action, but this ancient steam engine was quite interesting. There were a couple of kids playing all around the train and refusing to come out of it.

Things I learnt during this trip:

1. Never ever have your sunglasses on while taking snaps. You get misguided on the exposure of the snap. I did that for the first few snaps and later realized that I was actually taking over exposed snaps. This snap is also a tad bit over exposed, that's because of the second lesson I learnt.

2. When you review your snaps on the camera especially in bright daylight, the snaps look underexposed. So just remember to take two to three snaps with different settings to be on the safer side.

3. If you want the subject to stand out, try at get it to poke into the sky. What better way to do that than to go closer to the floor. Out of all the snaps I took, this one was good. What I liked in it was there was enough space above the train hence not giving the effect that it ended abruptly on top.

The dark room

Well since all of us seem to be self acclaimed photography enthusiasts it would be good to share our experiences while taking some of the snaps we like or some interesting article we came across. It is true that there are a lot of forums and blogs on this, but this one is not just to learn photography, but to capture those memories associated with it. And yes, we also share what we did right and terribly wrong during that shoot. "The real deal" so to say. It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when we add a few more it makes that picture speak or even sing a song. And on that note we declare this blog open ;)