Light Trail Photography: A Beginners Guide

Light trail photography is a fun way to spice up your nighttime shots. Whether you are taking pictures of cityscapes, the stars, or even night portraits, this technique will make your photos stand out. If you want to learn how to do light trail photography easily, then keep reading.

What are light trails in photography?

Light trails are created when light-emitting elements are moving in the frame during exposure. It could be anything – car lights, distant traffic, or campfire sparks.

Trails can appear straight or curved depending on the movement path. The length of trails depends on time/distance traveled by light sources while the camera shutter is open.

No expensive photography equipment is necessary to achieve stunning results. It is also very easy to do. This is an excellent technique for urban photography. Long exposure light trails are a great way to bring a whole new level of interest to your images.

What do you Need for Doing Light Trail Photography?

You will need a tripod, wide-angle lens, and camera that supports bulb mode shooting. Bulb mode allows the shutter will remain open as long as you hold down the shutter button. This creates blurred effects when objects are moving during the exposure.

You will also need a stopwatch to measure exposure time. Shutter speed for light trails is usually set between 5 and 20 seconds. The length of exposure depends on the amount of light available and the results you want to achieve.

When doing light trail photography you normally wouldn’t use neutral density filters, but when you are out around blue hour, try using an ND filter to use a longer shutter speed while there is still more light.

I use either a 3-stop or a 4-stop ND filter when photographing during blue hour and twilights because it allows me to leave exposure times open for much longer than would be otherwise possible.

When shooting at night, I sometimes use a lens hood to prevent lens flares. This is especially important when photographing near a street light, or other highly-reflective objects.

I use the photo pills app on my iPhone to help me determine a good exposure value. In the ‘pills’ I choose the exposure selection. It has things to help you with finding a correct shutter speed based on exposure values, time of day, weather conditions, and camera settings. It is worth checking out.

Suggested Camera Settings

*Manual Mode (M)

*ISO 100 or lower

*Manual Focus (MF)

*Narrow Aperture (f/16 or beyond)

*Long Shutter Speed (8 to 30 seconds)

Light Trails are what your camera captures when you leave the shutter open for some time while you are pointing at moving objects, such as a busy street. You’ll get traffic trails that include head and tail lights. The longer the exposure, the longer the trails will be.

Anything moving in the frame during the exposure will become blurred lines in your final image, which can add depth and context to the frame but only if you use this technique well!

Image stabilization and high ISO does not help with light trail photography because it will just produce an unwanted effect and results may be blurry. Your camera must remain still during the exposure. This makes having a tripod necessary.

How to Photograph Light Trails

Here are some of the steps that I follow when I am shooting Light trails. The images here were all photographed with a Nikon D800 camera on a tripod. However, any digital type camera will work for this kind of photography.

The first thing to do when setting out to photograph light trails is to scout the location and know where you will be able to set up without any obstacles. You’ll need an area that is near a busy source of traffic, but ideally a place where there’s not too much ambient light (street lights, business signs, etc.) as they will affect your exposure times.

The above photo is a combination of multiple shots, with each shot taken between 8 to 10 seconds. Because it was blue hour and there was still plenty of light in the sky and some coming from the street lights, I used an ND 8 filter on my 15mm wide-angle lens to allow for longer exposures.

This shot was tricky because there wasn’t very much traffic at the time. I took multiple exposures to try and get as many streaks as I could in the streets.

One tip I would recommend is that if you are photographing an intersection or an on-ramp where there is a traffic signal, be aware of how long the red and green lights are. I always look around at the traffic that is stopped at the red light. Once the light turns green, I immediately press the shutter on my cable release. I shoot right as the vehicles enter into my shot.

If possible, set your camera to manual focus. Also, set your lens to infinite focus and disable autofocus. You don’t want the camera searching for focus as every passing vehicle causes it to kick in and ruin your exposure. Plus, the autofocus could introduce unwanted camera shake.

If you’re using autoexposure metering, try switching over to spot metering mode, so you will have a better idea of what parts of your scene are brightest and which will be best exposed accordingly.

Also, use your camera’s LCD screen to check out what areas of the photo are exposed properly.

If you’re shooting in RAW (and I recommend that you do) you can correct some exposure problems later but it’s harder to recover detail from blown-out highlights than it is from shadows, so take some time to make sure everything is correctly exposed.

If possible use a remote shutter release or at least set the timer delay to 3 seconds so no vibrations are introduced when pressing the shutter button. This kind of shot benefits from using a cable release or wireless remote control to give your camera no chance of introducing any vibration during the exposure.

Try Using Light Trails Creatively in Your Shots

Try to think outside of the box when it comes to perspectives. Instead of always shooting at eye level, try to look for opportunities to get low and shoot upwards. Also, be on the lookout for high vantage points, such as rooftops, bridges, or overpasses, and shoot down from above.

Another idea is to find a bridge or overpass that crosses over a busy freeway and set your shot up at the beginning of rush hour while there is less traffic. Find any street or highway with cars moving once the sun goes down. As rush hour approaches and more cars come by, you can leave your shutter speed open for a bit longer to capture the car light trails from the slow-moving vehicles moving in a continuous line.

You can even shoot rivers or waterways if there are lots of boats going up or down. Set up your tripod and camera pointing directly at the road or waterway.

You could also play with unique angles and compositions. If a car is coming towards you, try getting low to the ground or crouching so you can get a unique perspective of its lights streaking across your photo – it’ll give your images an entirely new look!

A winding road is another excellent opportunity for light trails. They allow for especially long shots, which means they’ll show more lights and thus offer a fuller picture of traffic flow.

This also makes it easier to compose your photo with cars coming from opposite directions, which adds another dimension to the image instead of showing only cars that are coming towards you or moving away.

Common mistakes to avoid when shooting light trails

With light trails photography you can create great compositions if you avoid some common mistakes. To prevent your photos from being ruined, let’s take a look at some of these issues.

1. Light trails that are too short

One of the most common mistakes when shooting light trails is shooting a photo with a very short exposure time. The typical mistake is only having the shutter open for only a few seconds which does not allow enough light to be gathered by your camera’s sensor.

A light trail photo needs to have very long exposure times for it to stand out and create the desired effect. This is why it’s important to know what shutter speed you need if you want to end up with a good final result.

2. Light trails that are too thin

If a light trail photo has a very thin and weak light trail, the composition will not be as strong as it could have been. This is sometimes the result of bad timing. For example, if there is very little moving traffic during the shot.

Try to plan your shot around a time when there is plenty of traffic, or choose a busier location. The more moving lights that are available, the more light streaks you will be able to capture in the image.

3. Not enough contrast

If contrast is too low, it will leave your image flat. There must be enough contrast to make the light trails stand out, or pop, in the image. You can make adjustments in post-processing by using global contrast or increasing the luminosity in the colors that are in the light streaks.

The idea here is to draw attention to the streaks of light and movement and not have them just blend in with the rest of the scene in the image.

4. Bad exposure

Incorrect exposure settings lead to poor results. If your photo is too dark, it will lack detail in your light streaks. If it’s too bright, you’ll get blown-out highlights. This makes getting the correct exposure one of the most critical factors to get right when taking photos with light trails.

5. Light trails that are too separated

If your photo does not have a lot of cars, the light streaks will be far apart and you’ll end up with a less dynamic composition. You can avoid this by using longer exposure times – the more cars you have in one frame, the fuller it will look. In addition to that, the distance between the cars will also affect this.

Look for light trails that are close together and don’t have a lot of space in between them. This is one of the most important characteristics you should look out for when it comes to making strong compositions with your light trail photos.