Traffic Trails Tutorial

It’s that time of year again, when rush hour co-incides with blue hour. Best ever night photography is possible when there is still enough light in the sky to see that gorgeous deep dark blue, and there’s a lot of traffic about.

Someone’s been Googling this search phrase, and landing here, which is useful, but I thought a tips list, (added to by my esteemed readers) would help even more, so here goes:

1. Use a tripod, of a decent weight, balanced properly and levelled. A wobbly or wonky tripod lightweight is nearly as bad as no tripod at all. A gorrillapod is not going to help, but if you can’t beg or borrow a reasonably heavy duty proper tripod, make a sturdy bean bag (by filling a large ziplock freezer bag with lentils), so that you can sit your camera on a wall.

2. Read Tripod 101 tips and tricks from Petteri Sulonen

3. There’s a right and wrong way to use a tripod. Connect the release plate to your camera with the ‘lens’ arrow facing in the direction your lens points, secure and check that it’s safely attached by lifting the camera. Position the legs so that the front one is pointing fowards, and the other two are to either side of your body position. That way a) you’re less likely to trip over them in the dark, and b) your tripod head will be in the right position to make adjustments. One day I’ll do right-and-wrong photos of this, and post them. But it’ll make sense when you try it.

4. Weigh your tripod down if there’s even the slightest wind, by hanging your bag on the middle post with a hook or sling you made earlier. You can improvise a sling with a short bungee which you can get from South Shields market for about £1 for 3, and this can double as a carrying strap.

5. Make sure you’re somewhere safe. A pedestrian refuge in the middle of a dual carriageway doesn’t count, unless it’s very wide indeed. Look for pedestrian bridges: the photos above and immediately below were taken from a skybridge over Newcastle’s central motorway, or try very deep verges.

6. Take a friend or two. You might be out for quite a while, and it’ll be cold, so some company is good, and you’ll feel safer. However if you’ve got an idea for an excellent location, be careful whom you tell, because you might just find them advocating photowalks to your chosen spot on various social networking sites. If your carefully crafted photograph is only one of 100 similar ones appearing all over the internet, you won’t sell many copies. (Not to give away your locations is useful advice in any case.)

7. Stay away from the obvious. We’ve all got Tyne Bridge postcard photographs in our collection, but they’ll only win prizes if there’s a new twist. The one below has been done a gazillion times.

8. A cable release is useful if you’ve got one, and they’re cheap, but you can always use the lens cap trick if you haven’t. If you’re using a cable release, test it first, check it’s firing w/o film in the camera, and if it’s a remote, that its batteries are charged.

9. That lens cap trick. Remove the lens cap. With the camera rigid on the tripod, hold a large lens cap (or your hand) over the lens, and fire the shutter, then remove your hand. Wait the requisite number of seconds, cover the lens again, and then close the shutter. Doing this minimises the mirror-slap shake that you get from all SLRs.

10. You’ll be using extremely wide depth of field, focal length at or near infinity, so you won’t need to fine focus. If you think you want something in the foreground to be sharp, shine a torch on your point of focus to focus manually: your auto focus most likely won’t work in the dark. Don’t shine your torch into the path of oncoming traffic, though.

photo credit: © Huw Golledge

11. Try a few shots at 10, 20 and 30 seconds exposure at f11, f16 and f22. This is called bracketing. Film and film cameras are very cheap, and the results are fantastic, so you can afford to use 3 shots to get one at the correct exposure. If you or one of your friends is shooting digital, you can chimp and copy the exposure settings. A smaller aperture (a bigger f number) will produce more detail and better results than a larger one. Do not be tempted to shoot at night at less than f8. Your photographs will be soft and/or definitely over exposed.

12. Wait for gaps in the traffic, buses, fancy police flashing lights, traffic helicopters, get traffic moving away from you for red rear lights, instead of bright headlight streaks, or better still get both.

13. Trains flashing past can be marvellous at night: they look transparent.

© Andy Proctor

14. You can combine photographs in post-production if you want to reveal more detail in the shadows, but if you’ve used a narrow aperture, the darks are going to have a lot of detail in them anyway.

15. Have fun. Every decent photograph of traffic trails is exciting and popular: people like them. They make good seasonal greetings cards and atmospheric prints for local bars and nightclubs.

This is Graham Stouph’s prizewinning night photograph, shot on a 5×4 in Type 55 (woo!), which is why it’s monochrome. One day his night shoot from the Sage will also be on the internet, even if we have to buy a copy in the final show fundraising auction. But at the moment, he doesn’t have a web presence. Watch this space.

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