Light trails into the city

lighttrails-eastern-freeway-melbourne-sunset

A couple of weeks ago I showed an image and did a little talk on it, and I want to continue doing that when I can, so today I have another image for you. It was taken about two weeks ago. A friend and I thought we would try a new spot for us to do some light trails over the Eastern Freeway going into the city. We weren’t sure if we would see the sunset there, but it seemed like a good spot regardless.

Light trails are fun to do, but to get good ones, you need lots of traffic. Then comes the problem with timing, if you want to get a sunset, then it won’t be dark enough to get really good light trails. You can get them, but they end up being quite short.

This was done just before the colour of the sunset disappeared. I have worked on them and enhanced them a bit more. The image is also about 5 or 6 images stacked together to give me better light trails. The white trails on the right were fine, as there were a lot of cars coming out of the city, but the the red lights were not. It was the wrong time of the day to get cars going into the city. The only way to get what I wanted was to stack a few images. It is something I like, being able to use Photoshop to get what I want.

Something I didn’t really notice until after I put the image on Instagram and people started commenting was how the red leads straight into the sunset, like it is colouring it. I did take our some of the other colour so it wouldn’t look so saturated.

I like the final result, and I hope you enjoy seeing it. I am going to try and do most posts like this each week.

 

lighttrails-eastern-freeway-melbourne-sunset

 

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20 Comments

  1. Beautiful, I love the colors. And this effect from moving cars. It makes me remember that I also played with these effects last year. Maybe I should use these photos in my blog?!?

  2. I like the balance between the light sources, on the one hand the evening glow at the horizon, the trailing lights of the traffic on the other. Fascinating!

    1. I did a tutorial on how for Digital Photography School, see if you can find it, it is really easy to do. Thank you Anne.

  3. Hi Love this one, I’ve not tried light trails yet, but I will get on with it now! People are right about the lights running into the sunset colours, it make the shot for me. I bet it was just your natural instinct for a great photo rather than coincidence. Thanks for showing it.

    1. Thank you Stever, they are great fun, and good because you see them in a way that our eyes can’t. Maybe it was instinct, I don’t know, but I have to admit I didn’t really think about it until later.

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