Night Time Driving

Have you ever taken your camera for a drive at night? I definitely hadn’t until the instructor from my Night and Low Light Photography course challenged us to do so. It was an interesting experience as I felt like such a creeper having a camera on a tripod in the car. Thankfully I didn’t have my big telephoto lens on, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been! (Given the long exposure times used, the most you would see of someone is a ghost IF they stayed the same distance from you for the length of the exposure and your camera is facing them, but they don’t know that.)

Note: All of these photos are SOOC (Straight Out of the Camera). I can’t make these colours up!

Mr. Bean was driving (thankfully!), which made it easier for me to operate the camera while we travelled around town. No photography caused accidents for us! I couldn’t imagine trying to operate my camera and driving, especially on some of the bumpy roads we encountered! (Hear that city of Calgary? Some of your roads need to be repaved!)

The best place to do this is in a place with lots of different lights. We drove from the northwest of the city through downtown,  then south along one of the main drags and back up north along another main thoroughfare.

The trick with these type of photos is to use the smallest aperture, lowest ISO and longest shutter speed you can while not over exposing. Most of the time I used f/22 or higher, ISO 100 and 20 – 30 second exposure time.

It’s also interesting to take photos when you’re moving and stopping in the same exposure as you can see what was around you as well as the motion.

It’s also good to have a frame of reference, like the dash of the car, to show the motion of you driving past the lights. Or are the lights moving past you? I guess it all depends on your frame of reference. 😛

Another benefit of having Mr. Bean with me while taking the photos was his ideas on how to make lights look cool. I stack it all up to his amazing knowledge about physics and light. 🙂

The above photo was taken on an S curve. Neat, hey?

If your car isn’t changing direction enough, you can create that by moving your camera.

Unfortunately, driving your car in circles doesn’t create the most interesting looking photo…

Have you ever taken your camera for a drive?

*The photo of the sideview mirror is my submission for this week’s reflection themed Foto Friday.