Light Trails on the A7

I ventured outside tonight and took advantage of the fog that had descended upon Hawick to see if I was able to photograph any passing vehicles. Having only little experience with adjusting the settings on my camera I was worried about how I would fair, but I think the images I came away with were promising.

This one was taken on the way

The first photograph I took was out of focus but I'm happy with the composition and the headlight trail this particular car left behind. I carried on to the hill opposite the A7 just down from Homebase and sat for about 45 minutes, essentially waiting for cars to pass by. The traffic was by no means heavy but plenty opportunities arose for me to snap away!  

The streetlights interfered quite a lot

I played around with the exposure, shutter speed and ISO between most shots, this gave me an indication of what combinations worked the best. Again, most of these ones are blurry and out of focus. I succumbed to the reality that at this stage of my learning, I wasn't going to be able to achieve the level of quality I wanted to.

In this case the streetlights were less overbearing

 I included this one because I like the red brake lights disappearing behind the hill as the car drove down the road out of shot.

My first full length light trail!

I tried to include the tree branches in the foreground that hovered above me where I sat

A lot darker which I wanted, but very out of focus

Adjusting the exposure and lowering the amount of light that was getting into the lens, really drew more attention to the light trails themselves, rather than the streetlights or other objects in the image.

A more focused version of the photograph above

 I was getting into a rhythm and getting used to the time it took to focus as I pushed down to capture until the photograph was taken.

I must have slipped on the wet grass during this one...

The next couple of images I like a lot better. Only the lights of the cars, lampposts and houses in the background are visible.

The last few I took are completely different to the rest in that a lot more is illuminated. I managed to position myself in such a location where I had a foreground (the tree branches) to compliment the background (the road and cars).

The very last photograph I took is probably my favourite! I deliberately and slowly moved the camera downwards as I took the image. Looks pretty cool.

This collection of photographs were an experiment into how well I can operate my camera at a different time of day. Capturing these light trails proved a great opportunity for me to get used to adjusting things like exposure and shutter time. I must mention that I have yet to edit these images, actually I may just include them in my unit entirely un-edited to accurately display my findings.